1 Topic by uscgrad93

  • uscgrad93
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  • Registered: 2015-03-04
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Topic: ext4 and linux-swap formatted partitions appear as 'unknown'

I wanted to upgrade the Micro SD card in my cell phone from 16GB to 32GB.  The card has 3 partitions: 1) Fat32, 2) ext4, 3) linux swap.  I used a tool called aparted on the cell phone to partition and format the new 32GB SD card.  The tool says all partitions have been formatted correctly.

I loaded gparted live 0.21.0-1-i586 and read the 32GB SD card.  gparted shows the first partition as Fat32, the second as 'unknown' and the third as 'unknown'.  So then I thought I would use gparted to do its own formatting of the 'unknown' partitions.  I instructed it to format the second partition as ext4 and the third partition to linux swap and do nothing with the first partition.

After the formatting successfully completed, gparted scanned the SD card.  Again, it reported that the second and third partition types were 'unknown'.

I noticed on the supported file system page that for ext4 you need efsprogs and for linux-swap you need util-linux.  Do I need these tools to use these file systems under a live distro?  If so, how?

I am really just wanting to load the smaller SD card and copy the partitions to the larger SD card while increasing the Fat32 partition size.

Thanks for all the help.  I really like gparted but have only used it for simpler tasks in the past.

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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  • Registered: 2007-11-30
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Re: ext4 and linux-swap formatted partitions appear as 'unknown'

All necessary packages, programs, and libraries are included on GParted Live.

GParted uses parted and blkid to recognize many file system types.

Would you be able to provide the output from the following three commands?

sudo fdisk -l -u

where one of the options is a lower case "L" and not the number one.

sudo parted /path-to-your-device unit s print

where /path-to-your-device is something like /dev/sda.

sudo blkid