Hi,

I've just inherited a PC which suffered a catastrophic failure (power supply fritzed, blew out the motherboard). It sported two physical hard disks, "hda" was the root of a red-hat install and "hdb" simply stack of shared data.

I've put both disks onto into a slackware 8.1 machine in an attempt to rescue as much data as possible. The partitions on hda all mount fine, using swap/ext2/ext3. But I can't mount the single partition on hdb, it just gives me "bad superblock" even when mounted with "-t auto". Partition type is 83 according to fdisk. Worse, the owner knows he put a non-ext filesystem on it, but he doesn't remember which one!

So, my question is - is there any way I can find out what file system is on that partition without having to mount it? Because I can't mount it until I know! Or is there a way to prove that it is basically fried?

Thanks, nic

adds are its reiserfs, or jfs, or possibly xfs ... just try them one by one

it probably needs a fsck tho

And they could be a chance that your slcak system doesn't support the filesystem used, so compile in all the available filesystems (or at least check which ones it's supports)...