Hey,

On dg., ag. 11 2019, 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.


Just adding two things to what marc wrote: partition number 4
(sda4) is very often used as the extended partition in DOS
partition tables. Regardless of its type, you should check the
partition table; it will have the type byte set for each partition
which says which use it's supposed to have, though it can actually
not match the partition contents.

I recall gparted and IIRC parted show this quite nicely. man
parted was useful (at the very least the help command was).

If it is an extended partition, then it's not supposed to be
mountable, but you should check the 5th partition instead.


Another fun thing that will work even if you are not using a DOS
partition table is: just hexdump it!

    dd if=/dev/sda4 bs=1M count=1 | hd | less

File systems usually have some kind of readable ASCII information
at the beginning and amongst others an NTFS partition will be
obvious there.
--
Evilham