# FSCK: cannot determine filesystem type (6.2->8.2)



## monkeyboy (Jun 30, 2011)

I converted a FreeBSD 6.2 system to 8.2, with a couple of data drives that supposedly would "move over". However I found that bsdlabel complained about the partitioning of these drives and then fsck reported 
	
	



```
cannot determine filesystem type
```
 Got me a little worried that 8.2 couldn't read these drives/filesystems from 6.2.

As it turns out, running *fsck_ffs* instead worked fine and the drives mounted okay. I gather that between 6.2 and 8.2, fsck tried to get "smarter" but not smart enough to figure out to use fsck_ffs with these drives. Also the use of the 'c' partition is now (weakly) prohibited.

It would be nice to be able to "restore" 8.2 fsck's ability to realize that these are FFS filesystems. Any clues as to how? (I guess I could read the code to see what it is trying to test.)


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## graudeejs (Jun 30, 2011)

Use the -t flag.

`$ fsck -t ufs /dev/da0`
(Don't remember if ufs was in lowercase or uppercase, probably lowercase)


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## acheron (Jun 30, 2011)

See this thread http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2011-June/011662.html


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## monkeyboy (Jun 30, 2011)

Thanks, I get it now, although not sure why dumpfs can figure these things out, but fsck needs to look in fstab when a filesystem may very well not be in there. I guess you could argue the read vs read/write/destroy issue, but presuming that fstab is actually correct doesn't seem much better.


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## tingo (Jul 3, 2011)

Yes, it is a bit annoying that fsck in 8.2 (or perhaps this started in 8.1, I don't remember) can't figure this out on its own, while it did in all previous releases. It could be argued that this change is a POLA violation, too.


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