Knowing when a filesystem is created , you can deduce when an operating system was installed . find filesystem device (/dev/) informations by using the cat /etc/fstab command. Show Sample Output

Just change /dev/sda1 to whatever your partition of interest is. This snippet should do the rest. Show Sample Output

To check the total number of mounts, maximum number of mounts before performing the fsck and last time when the fsck was performed. Show Sample Output

You are probably aware that some percent of disk space on an ext2/ext3 file system is reserved for root (typically 5%). As documented elsewhere this can be reduced to 1% with tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sdX (where X = drive/partition, like /dev/sda1) but how do you check to see what the existing reserved block percentage actually is before making the change? You can find that with dumpe2fs -h /dev/sdX You get a raw block count and reserved block count, from which you can calculate the percentage. In the example here you can easily see that it's currently 1%, so you won't get any more available space by setting it to 1% again. FYI If your disks are IDE instead of SCSI, your filesystems will be /dev/hdX instead of /dev/sdX. Show Sample Output