On Sunday 16 February 2025 22:57:29 Greenwich Mean Time Philip Webb wrote: > I successfully formatted one of the partitions which failed with Ext2 as > Vfat. I was able to mount it, create a file with words in it, > save it, list it via 'ls', browse it & then delete it, all using Gentoo. > This suggests that the problem isn't due to defective hardware, > but is somewhere in 'mke2fs' or related material. > > Any observations are very welcome.
A USB drive which disconnects itself without interference by the user does not indicate a problem caused by any filesystem in and of itself. However, a poor quality or buggy USB flash controller which drops the connection because it is overloaded by data, could produce all sort of random failures. I am no filesystem expert, but my thinking is an ext2 filesystem will try to commit more data to a block device than FAT does while formatted. Ext2 will write in many different blocks across the partition by creating backups of its superblock, inode bitmaps, inode tables, etc. If a USB drive cannot cope with this relatively simple transaction of committing to flash cells the structure of a filesystem, then it must have bigger problems. Instead of writing and deleting a simple text file, I would try to stress test the drive by copying over a more demanding workload in order to see if this succeeds without dmesg coming up with any more errors.
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
