Thank you for your clarifications. As I recalled, gparted is a GUI
that does both parted and mkfs -- my memory was correct that by using
gparted as I did, there not only was some header claiming a XFS format,
but the drive was in fact so formatted. Although I fully agree that the
CLI commands (parted and xfs) are more versatile with more options than
gparted, I have found both in teaching students and training technicians
that for most purposes, gparted is sufficient and is less prone to human
error (including typing errors).
I suggest that you might comment upon the actual output from parted and
mount that I included in a related thread on this list: ( Re: parted
and mount ** EXTERNAL ** ) and thus I am not reproducing that
information here. What the outputs seemed to show was that parted found
that /dev/sdg was XFS and thus I assume "mountable" by root, but that
mount refused to accept the same device. As you point out, /dev/xyz
can be mounted, not just /dev/xyzN . As for the concerns that these
might be part of a LVM or some other file/disk/storage logical structure
beyond the original (and very limited) partition scheme adopted for
MS-DOS on very limited (pre-demand-page-virtual-memory) X86 machines
(and much more limited than current X86-64 machines), I will do as you
suggest; but as I formatted the external USB 2 Tbyte drive with
gparted, I suspect that the drive has the "simple" partition format
(from an epoch with much more limited disk controllers and disk types
than currently available on "small systems" -- e.g., IDE or even SCSI
contrasted with SATA, but not "mainframe" technology of that epoch).
The partition scheme of MS DOS type machines is relatively simple and
limited, but likewise, more easily recovered and manipulated; in my
opinion (no flame wars, please), the current disk/file system structures
often are more fragile for "simple" applications such as a standalone
but Internet capable workstation. This is not to state that I prefer MS
FAT or EXT2 file system formats -- given the current stability and
capabilities of XFS, that is the file system (not partition, etc.,
scheme) that I prefer.
Aside (not SL): Does anyone know: is XFS available for MS Win, Mac OS
X, or Android? If so, is it licensed for free, or is it only through a
proprietary application for fee?
Yasha Karant
On 09/27/2018 05:01 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 2:38 AM Yasha Karant wrote:
>> I have attempted to mount USB external formatted media on a SL7 system.
>> One was a flash drive with a MS format (reported by parted as FAT32);
>> the other was a 2 Tbyte hard drive XFS formatted on a different SL7
>> system.
> /dev/sdg1 would be the first "partition" on the device. "parted -l
> /dev/sdg" will report partitions.
>
> There need not to be partitions. It is also possible to write a
> filesystem directly on the whole device, which may be the case for
> whatever formatted it, in which case it would be on /dev/sdg.
>
> Partition tables are an old, extremely lightweight system written into
> a very few blocks at the beginning of the disk for *ancient* disk
> controllers. As such, it is *extremely* limited. In fact, by the
> standard, a disk can only have 4 partitions: set up some space as
> extended partitions, and then a kernel can get fancy and do LVM,
> software RAID, etc. There is a byte or two set aside for labeling the
> "type" of the partition, but there ae many more types of filesystems
> now, so tools like parted cannot really keep up: it's why there is not
> an "ext4" option for making partions in parted, and why we typically
> use "ext2" for that.
>
> gparted, while a fine and useful tool, is a graphical wrapper for
> "parted", and "mkfs" of various flavors. Like many open source GUI's,
> it hides options available from the command line. But I'm surprised if
> you can't run "parted -l" to get a listing of all the partitions on
> all your attached devices that are detected, including "/dev/sdg" if
> that is indeed your attached device with data on it.
>
> You know I'm wondering if you inadvertently set up volume group
> and logical volumes on your drive, activating them with gparted
> without even realizing it. What does "pvscan" and "vgscan" say? I
> remember that gparted supports those, and if you'd not even installed
> the LVM tools on your second system, you wouldn't have those scanning
> tools available.
