Quote Originally Posted by zillah
Can we tag (label) a partition with (eg: 0xBF for Solaris) and create filesystem (format ) of type ext2 ? yes of course it is meaningless,,,just for my knowledge.
The partition table, a small number of bytes at the end of sector zero of track zero, includes a byte per partition that is used to indicate the type of partition. This is set by partitioning software to the proper value to indicate what type of partition it is (and sometimes changed by software that "hides" partitions from users or operating systems.) Partitioning software does not, however, write all of the other file structure information needed within the partition by a file system; that is done by formatting. The easy way to acomplish what you ask would be to make the partition of the proper type, format it with a tool that functions normally, and then edit this byte to indicate a different format type. But it's certainly not a good idea. The best and most likely case is that software looking at the partition table would expect a different type of file system there and give you error when it couldn't make sense of the data contained in the partition. The worst case is that it would write something and destroy anything that you had there.