Background: When I set up my Wheezy system, I reserved (and formatted) a FAT32 partition on one of my disks for a possible installation of Windows. I now want to reformat that partition to ext4 to use for other purposes.
What puzzles me is this -- when I look at /etc/fstab for some of the other partitions that are already ext4 I see entries like this: # /var was on /dev/sdb8 during installation UUID=874304c9-36c6-4572-909b-c4c75d13269a /var ext4 defaults 0 2 When I look at the same partition in /etc/mtab, I see this: /dev/sdb8 /var ext4 rw,relatime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 What I don't understand, for example, is where and how relatime got set (and maybe some of the other parameters). (Aside: I'd prefer to set noatime for the reformatted partition as it is on an SSD, and will be used for data, not executables.) I plan to reformat the disk with mkfs.ext4. Initially, when I set up the system, I used the Wheezy installer to partition and format the disks. I'm assuming that it used mkfs.ext4 to do the formatting. I looked at /etc/mke2fs.conf and did not see any reference to relatime. Finally (well, I have another question that I'll post separately), I'm assuming that I can include noatime in the /etc/fstab file I change the entry for the partition I am reformatting? (That is where noatime is set on my Jessie system.)