A Couple More Ways To Find Your File System Type

Today we’re going to revisit a previous subject and share a couple more ways to find your file system type. I’ve covered this subject before, but I only shared a couple of ways. This being Linux, there are multiple file system types and multiple ways to find the details. So, let’s cover it again but with different options.

If you did your installation manually, you probably already know this information. You probably know the file system types you chose to use during the installation process. On the other hand, if you did your installation by just letting the installer use the defaults, you might not know this information. This may also be something like an unknown computer you’re tasked with fixing. So, there are real-world reasons why you might want to know the file system types in use.

If you want to visit the previous article, you can find that here:

How To: Find The File System Type

You could easily have multiple file system types in use right now. This is quite likely if you’re dual-booting with Windows or you’re using EFI as your boot method. You could even have external disks formatted in all sorts of file types.

All of these various file types may need specific commands to repair them and maintain them. You don’t want to go using the wrong tool for the wrong file type. That’d likely make your problems even worse. So, this is good information to have and this article will show you how to find your file system type.

Find Your File System Type:

This requires an open terminal. Like many of these articles, we’ll be using a terminal. It’s painless and it’s a good idea to know some of these commands. The terminal is fairly universal, so you can open your terminal (usually) by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

In the previous article, we used lsblk and we also used df. Those are both excellent tools and excellent ways to get this information. They’re simple and easily memorized. The two commands we’ll use today will be similar in those regards. This truly is not a complicated task, it’s just fun to cover the different methods that one could use.

Using The mount Command:

The first command we’re going to learn about is the mount command. Don’t worry, this is part of your standard installation and you won’t need to do anything extra to use it. You can check the man page with man mount if you’d like. If you did do so, you’d find that the mount application is described as:

mount – mount a filesystem

No, we won’t be mounting and unmounting anything. We’ll just be using the command to find your file system types. That command’s syntax would look like this:

That’s the command that will show you all of your drives and all of the drive’s file system types in one go. I plugged a couple of external drives in so that I could run the command and show you the expected output:

using the mount command to find the file system type
You can see that there are vfat and ext4 file systems in use. That’s normal. It’s all good!

There’s nothing too eccentric in that output. Those are fairly normal file systems as far as Linux systems go. There are more. There are many more. You can check a list of file system types on Wikipedia.

Using The fsck Command:

Yes, you can even use the fsck command to find the file system types. You’re telling the command to not actually run and just spit out some information, so there’s nothing laborious or complicated with this command. You will need to know the path to the disk in question. I’m sure you know how to do that. Heck, the first command in this article will do that for you.

When you do this with the fsck command, you’re doing so on a disk-by-disk method. If you’re unfamiliar with the fsck command, you can check the man page with man fsck. Once again, you won’t have to install anything. The fsck command is a part of the standard base, files you’ll find on pretty much every distro by default. Anyhow, the man page describes fsck as:

fsck – check and repair a Linux filesystem

We will not be repairing a Linux filesystem (I’ve intentionally stylized this as ‘file system’ as it appears both spellings are in common usage) but we will sort of be checking them. We won’t be checking them for errors because that’d take too long and isn’t a part of this article. If you do want to check your file systems for errors with fsck, you should read this article:

How To: Check A Disk For Errors

Or maybe this article:

Repair Your Linux Filesystem With a Live USB or DVD

Anyhow, if you want to find your file system type with fsck, the syntax is simile and is as follows:

This is usually going to start with a /dev and then the drives populate  (enumerate?) as is logical. You would have drive sda, then partitions on that drive might be sda1, sda2, etc… So, an example command might be:

An example output is as follows:

you can use the fsck command to find the file system type for a specific drive
This only really works on one drive/partition at a time. That’s plenty useful.

See? Pretty useful if you need to know a file system type before working on it.

Closure:

So, we’ve covered a couple of new ways for you to find your file system type. This time around, we’ve used fsck and mount and both of them are perfectly useful for this application. If you work on multiple computers, if you work on someone else’s computers, if you work on remote computers, etc. then these commands may come in useful. 

Plus, this seemed like a fun article to write. There are all sorts of older articles that could have more information added to them. Some of the older articles contain errors that should be fixed. Some could use being written again but with a more suitable format.

A couple of the articles are just plain garbage and should have been deleted. They weren’t… They should have been, but they weren’t. I should probably go back and write those over again in their entirety. I’ve completely blown it a few times. I do like to point out that I probably learn more than you do by writing these articles and (importantly) getting feedback on them. I do love some feedback, though it’d be cool if it was left here when it adds something to the article.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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Repair Your Linux Filesystem With a Live USB or DVD

It’s possible for your filesystem to become so corrupted that you can’t repair it easily. In that case, you can repair your Linux filesystem with a live USB or DVD.

Your filesystem may become corrupted for any number of reasons. One of the most common reasons is an improper shutdown, where your filesystem doesn’t have time to properly write everything to disk because it wasn’t shut down properly. You might see that sort of thing when you suffer from a power outage. 

There are any number of reasons why your filesystem will have become corrupted and, in most instances, your system will automatically repair your Linux filesystem when you boot your computer.

It’s also possible that a simple boot won’t repair your Linux filesystem. In that case, your OS probably has some sort of recovery mode and you can use that mode to repair your filesystem. 

Once in a while, your filesystem may have become so corrupted that you can’t fix it in recovery mode because you can’t get to recovery mode to fix it. Not to worry. This is something you can easily do with a live USB or DVD.

This article assumes you already have a USB or DVD with an OS that runs live. I’ll use Ubuntu as the example OS, as it’s really common. Adjust for your distro and you’ll be okay.

Here’s a link if you need to know how to access your temporary boot menu

NOTE: If you’re using Btrfs, you shouldn’t need to run fsck, it should heal itself. If not, here are Btrfs-specific commands that you should learn.

Repair Your Linux Filesystem:

The first thing you’re going to do is boot to the USB or DVD. You’ll need to be patient as the live instance loads into RAM. Once the OS has loaded to a GUI, you’ll want to select “Try Ubuntu”. (Remember to adjust that for your own distro, should you not be using Ubuntu.)

Again, this will take a minute – especially on older hardware. Eventually, the GUI will load and you’ll have a functional live instance running. If you needed to use nomodeset, acpi=off, or anything similar, you’ll probably also need to use those things to get the live instance of Linux running.

The tool we’re going to use is known as ‘fsck‘, which is a tool in and of itself and a front end for other tools. fsck interacts with more specific tools for your specific filesystem, but that’s not important right now. 

If you’re curious, fsck stands for ‘file system consistency check‘ and the man page helpfully describes it as:

fsck – check and repair a Linux filesystem

Now that you have a functional live desktop, it’s time to repair your Linux filesystem. The first step is, as is often the case, opening up your terminal. You can use your keyboard to do this, just press CTRL + ALT + T and a terminal should pop right up.

At this point, you’ll want to identify the correct disk. To do that, you run:

You’ll want to identify the disk where you installed Linux. That’s the disk that has the corrupted filesystem that is preventing you from booting. It’s often something like ‘/dev/sda1’ or maybe even ‘/dev/nvme0n1p1’.

Once you have the disk identified, it’s time to repair your Linux filesystem. Enter this:

NOTE: Change the /dev/sda* to match the data from the fdisk command you ran earlier.

That ‘fsck’ command should find and fix any errors automatically. If you really know what you’re doing, you can run ‘fsck’ manually and maybe do a better job than the automatic method. Then again, if you know that much then I’d suspect you don’t actually need this article.

This shouldn’t take very long to run, unless there were a whole lot of errors. Next, all you need to do is reboot and you should find that you were able to successfully repair your Linux filesystem. To do that from the terminal, you can just type:

When prompted, remove the disk from the drive and press the ENTER button.

Closure:

There you have it, another way to run fsck and to repair your Linux filesystem when it is broken. This method works even when the recovery mode will have worked.

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