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How do I find out the vfstype of a hard drive partition when it is unmounted in BusyBox?

My question is specific for BusyBox since I am trying to do a mount during a Debian install.

If I do fdisk -l I get a label that just says "Linux". This does tell me if the partition is ext2 or ext3 or whatever.

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  • With a modern version of mount the file-system type should not need to be specified.
  • sudo blkid displays label, uuid and type (and lsblk to display capacities)
  • file -s /dev/sdX# does the job for partitions as well as disk images.
  • ls /sys/block/*/* is a good resource for many things (but not determining filesystem type)

I assume this is an embedded device, otherwise you should be taking advantage of coreutils, util-linux, etc. rather than busybox.

Let me make this clear, busybox is not consistent across the board - various vendors strip out commands or cripple them to varied degrees. That said, blkid should be available. Run busybox --help which will list the commands compiled into the busybox binary. Also note that often not all those symlinks will exist, so you may need to create them as needed.

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