disktype Documentation

Christoph Pfisterer

Abstract

This is the documentation for disktype, a program to detect the content format of a disk or disk image. It covers installation and usage of the program, but most of all provides background information on the recognized file systems and other formats. That information is useful both for interpreting disktype output and for general reference. Pointers to further documentation are included where possible.


Table of Contents

1. Installation and Usage
1.1. Installation
1.2. Usage
1.3. Usage Examples
1.4. Device Naming
2. Coming To Terms
2.1. Byte Ordering
2.2. Sectors and Blocks
2.3. Drive Geometry Cruft
2.4. Partitioning
2.5. Superblocks and Spacing
2.6. Inodes and Links
2.7. Block Allocation
3. Recognized Formats
3.1. Amiga
3.1.1. The Amiga File System
3.1.2. The Professional File System
3.1.3. The Rigid Disk Partitioning Scheme
3.2. Apple Macintosh
3.2.1. The Macintosh File System (MFS)
3.2.2. The Hierarchical File System (HFS)
3.2.3. The HFS Plus File System
3.2.4. The Apple Partitioning Scheme
3.3. ATARI ST
3.3.1. The GEMDOS File System
3.3.2. The ATARI ST (AHDI) Partitioning Scheme
3.4. General PC Formats
3.4.1. PC-style Partition Tables
3.4.2. EFI GPT Partition Table
3.5. Linux File Systems
3.5.1. ext2 and ext3
3.5.2. ReiserFS
3.5.3. Reiser4
3.5.4. Minix
3.5.5. romfs
3.5.6. cramfs
3.5.7. squashfs
3.6. Other Linux Formats
3.6.1. Linux Swap
3.6.2. Linux LVM Physical Volumes
3.6.3. Linux RAID Physical Disks
3.6.4. Debian Split Floppy
3.7. Microsoft
3.7.1. FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32
3.7.2. NTFS
3.8. IBM
3.8.1. HPFS
3.8.2. JFS
3.9. Other Unix Flavors
3.9.1. UFS
3.9.2. BSD Disklabels
3.9.3. System V FS
3.9.4. XFS
3.9.5. Solaris SPARC Disklabel
3.9.6. Solaris x86 Disklabel
3.10. Miscellaneous Systems
3.10.1. BeOS BFS
3.10.2. QNX RTOS
3.10.3. Veritas VxFS
3.11. CD File Systems
3.11.1. ISO9660
3.11.2. The Joliet Extension
3.11.3. The RockRidge Extension
3.11.4. Hybrid PC/Macintosh CDs
3.11.5. The El Torito Boot Specification
3.11.6. UDF
3.11.7. Sega Dreamcast
3.11.8. Xbox DVD file system
3.11.9. 3DO file system
3.12. Boot Loaders
3.12.1. GRUB
3.12.2. FreeBSD
3.12.3. Windows and MS-DOS
3.12.4. BeOS and derivatives
3.13. Disk Image Formats
3.13.1. Raw CD Images
3.13.2. Apple Disk Images
3.13.3. Linux cloop Images
3.13.4. Virtual PC Disk Images
3.14. Archive Formats
3.14.1. tar
3.14.2. cpio
3.14.3. dump/restore
3.14.4. bar
3.15. Compression Formats
3.15.1. compress
3.15.2. gzip
3.15.3. bzip2
4. Other Sources of Information

List of Tables

1.1. Device Name Examples