On 10.08.19 21:51, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> So I want to find out what's in /dev/sda4 on my hard drive. The
> computer has *never* had Windows on it. So I try to mount it, and am
> told:
>
> april:/farhome/hendrik# mount /dev/sda4 /test
> NTFS signature is missing.
> Failed to mount '/dev/sda4': Invalid argument
> The device '/dev/sda4' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
> Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
> partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way
> around?
> april:/farhome/hendrik#
>
> Why would it try for and NTFS file system on a Linux machine?

To move from speculation to analysis requires information. One way to
read the filesystem type of an unmounted filesystem is with blkid, e.g.:

$ blkid /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="fred" UUID="7713e1b5-1bdf-41d1-9aa9" TYPE="ext2"

As you have not specified an fstype in the mount command, it'll normally
use the blkid libraries to discover the fstype in just this way, so
let's see what it finds.

Erik