23rd January 2021, 3 min read

dumpe2fs: When was my hard-drive first formatted?

I repeatedly forget to remember when my hard-drive or SSD was first formatted.

Command for this is dumpe2fs. This command is part of package e2fsprogs. Example:

# dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1
dumpe2fs 1.45.6 (20-Mar-2020)
Filesystem volume name:   <none>
Last mounted on:          /boot
Filesystem UUID:          83a1bedb-6fd3-46d0-8900-e4e09536168e
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features:      ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype sparse_super
Filesystem flags:         signed_directory_hash
Default mount options:    user_xattr acl
Filesystem state:         clean
Errors behavior:          Continue
Filesystem OS type:       Linux
Inode count:              62248
Block count:              248832
Reserved block count:     12441
Free blocks:              126393
Free inodes:              61933
First block:              1
Block size:               1024
Fragment size:            1024
Reserved GDT blocks:      256
Blocks per group:         8192
Fragments per group:      8192
Inodes per group:         2008
Inode blocks per group:   251
RAID stride:              4
RAID stripe width:        4
Filesystem created:       Mon Apr 21 13:45:32 2014
Last mount time:          Sun May 31 14:18:09 2020
Last write time:          Mon Jun  1 00:40:25 2020
Mount count:              35
Maximum mount count:      -1

You must be root to use this command. It does not work for encrypted disks (LUKS) or volume groups.

Added 18-Feb-2023: Compare output for SSD and M.2 disk.