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I pulled the hard drive from a *nix-based CCTV DVR so I could look at the contents and mount points, with the explicit intention of mounting a separate drive at the folder wherever the video is stored. I plugged it into an external dock and one 6 GB partition opened in Nautilus; GParted shows a larger unknown file system before the 6 GB volume. Is there a command I can run to discover the FS type of the unknown volume?

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If the CCTV DVR is *nix based, it might have a filesystem you can know about; for that you may get some good results just running:

file -s /dev/xxx

on the device file of the partition. The fact you can open the second partition seems promising (there might even be data on the second partition as clues, like fstab entries).

However, depending on brand and vendor and such, it's always possible that the secondary parition is proprietary (not very common to invent a private filesystem though), or managed by a driver built locally on the DVR device, it could be a kind of logical partition created by the DVR firmware which embeds known filesystems within it, so gparted and such will only read the GUID partition table and not know anything more about the partition's contents. (More information may be available if you were able to post more detail about the DVR hardware and firmware, and possibly details about the known partition).

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    file -s reports that unknown partition as "data", The second partition, the 6GB one, reports an ext2 FS. blkid doesn't report anything for the unknown part., and reports ext2 for part 2.
    – user208145
    Mar 29, 2016 at 2:35
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    gparted/parted might not have enough detail, what code does gdisk give for that partition? gdisk /dev/xxx and command "p" (for print)
    – Mercury00
    Mar 29, 2016 at 3:06
  • Partition code is 8300, which corresponds to "Linux filesystem". I tee'd the output to a file, but it's too long for the comments section. dropbox.com/s/blxa89ng6wh6ek3/gdisk_info.txt
    – user208145
    Mar 29, 2016 at 3:51
  • Hmm, I must have misread the original post and though this was GPT. fidsk might show different information, but gdisk at least thinks it's a linux fs. Short of hex dumping the header data to work out the filesystem, you might be able to guess at it - what output do you get if you try to mount it specifying the type, like: mount -t xfs /dev/xxx /tmp/mount (or btrfs or reiserfs or zfs or jfs)? I don't expect this to work, but might give info.
    – Mercury00
    Mar 30, 2016 at 20:40
  • Theres a few other things to check, but my suspicion is that this data partition is managed data via proprietary software on the DVR. It may not be possible to read it without inside information on the DVR firmware and manufacturer, etc.
    – Mercury00
    Mar 30, 2016 at 23:28

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