Re: Partition information as text file?

[Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org>]

Le 30/01/2019 à 16:07, Richard Owlett a écrit :
> On 01/29/2019 02:08 PM, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
> > Le 29/01/2019 à 15:30, Richard Owlett a écrit :
> > > all my disks have "msdos Partition table".
> >
> > Irrelevant.
>
> Debian thought it relevant enough to mention in a warning(error?) 
> message.

Not Debian. Just tune2fs, as a hint suggesting that maybe you specified 
the wrong device.

> > >   I get the following error message:
> > > > root@fromdell:/home/richard# tune2fs -l /dev/sda
> > > > tune2fs 1.43.4 (31-Jan-2017)
> > > > tune2fs: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda
> > > > Found a dos partition table in /dev/sda
> >
> > You must specify the partition containing the filesystem, not the 
> > whole disk.
>
> The man pages for fdisk, parted, sfdisk, tune2fs, and dumpe2fs each give 
> "device" as a possible parameter. Only the last two balk at it.

"Device" is in the generic sense of Unix block device. Not just a whole 
disk, but also a partition, logical volume, RAID array, encrypted volume...

fdisk, parted and sfdisk manage partition tables and expect a device 
containing a partition table.
tune2fs and dumpe2fs manage ext* filesystems and expect a device 
containing an ext* filesystem.