Question: Suppose there are several partitions in my computer. I'm not sure where is the folder I have to access. Usually what I do is mount all the partitions first and then search one by one.

Is there a way to list the files/folders in a unmounted partition, so I can mount only the partition that I need to access?

Answer: 
The tool looking inside an unmounted partition would need to interprete the filesystem's sturctures itself.

Such tools exist for various filesystem (cpmtools, mtools, ...) and some filesystems have similar functionality primarily intended to be a debugging help (as example see `debugfs`).

But why do you think, looking into the filesystem first is neccessary?

If you are in doubt what's on the partition and you don't want to take a risc, mount it readonly first and look inside.

Or what may I am missing?
Try `file -sL /dev/sdXY`. Will give you some limited information without mounting the filesystem.

```
$ file -sL /dev/sdc1
/dev/sdc1: Linux rev 1.0 ext2 filesystem data (mounted or unclean),
UUID=aa84c5a8-6418-4952-b577-578f2a67af86, volume name "music"
$

```