How do I find what type of file system is of an attached USB or SD card?

Question

How can I find the file system type of USB drive without using computer? Drive is attached to Android phone and I can see the files in it. I want to know if it is extFAT etc.

Answer 1

Related question: How to detect filesystem type of un-mounted partition?

Just to complete some missing pieces:

Usually we use mount command to see mounted filesystems, it works without root e.g. from a terminal emulator app or adb shell:

~$ mount
...
/dev/block/sda1 on /mnt/media_rw/C8BA-D0E2 type sdfat ...
/dev/block/sda2 on /mnt/media_rw/C78E-434F type vfat ...
/dev/block/sda3 on /mnt/media_rw/C81D-4E8D type vfat ...

It shows mounted filesystems on external USB drive to be sdfat and vfat which are not actual filesystems but filesystem drivers. A driver can support multiple filesystems and a filesystem can be mounted using different drivers. sdfat can be exFAT, FAT32 or FAT16. vfat can be one of latter two. Similarly filesystem types sdcardfs, fuse or fusectl aren't actual but virtual filesystems (FUSE can be used to mount any filesystem theoretically). So the output of mount command or apps like DiskInfo can be insufficient or misleading.

A more certain way is to read filesystem magic (file and blkid commands do this). But the problem is that storage devices are enumerated as block devices by Linux/Android kernel and device nodes are created by Android init/vold with restricted permissions so that only root processes can access them (see How to read ext4 filesystem without mounting on a non-rooted device?). So it's not possible to read partitions directly which hold filesystems inside them.

With root access:

~# blkid
/dev/block/sda1: ... TYPE="exfat"

~# file -s /dev/block/sda*
/dev/block/sda2: DOS/MBR boot sector ... FAT (32 bit)
/dev/block/sda3: DOS/MBR boot sector ... FAT (16 bit)

^{* Android's builtin blkid does have filesystem magic values but toybox file applet doesn't have. Use e.g. file on Termux which looks for a large magic database.}

~# hexdump -C -n100 /dev/block/sda1 | grep -o '[EX]*FAT[0-9]*'
EXFAT

^{* hexdump is a busybox applet.}

exFAT magic is found at offset 3, FAT32 at 82 and FAT12/FAT16 at 54. So for exFAT hexdump -e '"%_p"' -n5 -s3 /dev/block/sda1 returns EXFAT.

Similarly for EXT4 hexdump -e '"%X"' -n2 -s1080 should return EF53 and for F2FS hexdump -e '"%X"' -n4 -s1024 should return F2F52010.

Without root access:

Another option is to check logcat soon after boot or inserting USB drive or SD card. vold uses blkid at back end to detect filesystem before mounting which appears in log:

~$ adb logcat -v brief -s vold:V | grep TYPE=                                                                                                 
V/vold    (  752): /dev/block/vold/public:8,1: LABEL="disk" UUID="C8BA-D0E2" TYPE="exfat"

Answer 2

Apps like Disk Info also provide the format (enable "show file system" in settings).

Answer 3

To complete the other answers, DevCheck will show you the actual filesystem of /system and /sdcard unlike diskinfo.