On Sun, Aug 11, 2019 at 02:13:48PM +1000, Erik Christiansen wrote:
> 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.

april:/farhome/hendrik# blkid /dev/sda4
/dev/sda4: PARTLABEL="Linux filesystem"
PARTUUID="14fdecea-4672-4d03-9660-868f3fd630ec"
april:/farhome/hendrik#

And if it doesn't mention type, should I presume that it's likely a
partition that does not have a file system installed? Or at
least not one the current Linux system can handle?

-- hendrik