How to determine what partition is still not formatted?

[Paul Smith]

On 12/31/06, Jim Cornette <fc-cornette at insight.rr.com> wrote:
> >> ... if you issue parted /dev/sdx and then print, you are able to
> >> see all the partitions on sdx, including flags, filesystems a.s.o.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > Hadn't tried that, but it doesn't look like any more information than I
> > can get from fdisk. E.g. parted's 'print' shows the partition type, but
> > doesn't actually test whether there's a formatted file system there
> > unless you're doing a file system operation on it. And it feels safer to
> > me to just try and mount a partition temporarily, and read-only if you
> > really want to be careful.
>
> I guess if you see the partition type with fdisk and then try to mount
> the partition or activate the partition, it will tell you if it is
> formatted with the filesystem that it claims to be.
>
> Other than that, I never thought to try any out of the ordinary program
> to figure out if it is setup with a filesystem. I did that for DOS, so I
> guess other filesystem presence would work the same.

Thanks to all. The disk where I suspect that there is some unformatted
space is the following ('fdisk output'):

Disk /dev/hde: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hde1   *           1       10000    80324968+  83  Linux
/dev/hde2           10001       19457    75963352+  8e  Linux LVM

Paul