On Mar 15, 2008 00:17 +0800, Peter Teoh wrote: > given different harddisk partition, does anyone knows how to > differentiate one partition from another? > > at the kernel source level, which is the constant/variable for this? > > Is it EXT3_XATTR_MAGIC? (but EXT2_XATTR_MAGIC have the same value as > ext3, so betw the two they are not distinguisable?) > (or REISERFS_XATTR_MAGIC etc) Read the file (1) and blkid (8) man pages. These tools understand a lot of different magic numbers for filesystems: # file -s /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: Linux rev 1.0 ext3 filesystem data (needs journal recovery) (large files) # blkid /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: LABEL="/boot" UUID="1fe1d719-1a8c-45a0-969a-cba8b101cc57" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" > So I supposed if I were to create my > new filesystem, then just create a new /random value from this? Pretty much, yes. You should also add a LABEL and UUID field so that one instance of the filesystem can be distinguished from another. A better goal (IMHO) than creating your own new filesystem is to help out some existing filesystem like ext4 or btrfs. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html