250217 Michael wrote: > 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 > to see if this succeeds without dmesg coming up with any more errors.
I do hear you + Nuno clearly, but my own experience is that repeatable errors are the result of software problems -- incl eg omitted flags or inadequate config files -- & random errors are caused by faulty hardware. This problem is repeatable with 'mke2fs' : do I need a flag or config ? -- that cb something which has changed with the latest 256 GB sticks. I'm currently testing a 2.0/1.1 port to write an Ext2 file system. If that makes no difference, I'll see if I can do your stress test above after recreating a FAT file system on one of the partitions. Another test mb to create a very small partition -- eg 5 GB -- & see if 'mke2fs' wb able to format that without disconnecting. I'll report results when I have them (smile). The sticks were delivered, so I can't easily return them, & in any case we've had 50 cm snow dumped on us in the last few days. If a Linux file system really is unachievable, I can format the sticks as FAT, which sb adequate for simple archiving. Thanks to both of you for your advice so far. Comments from others are welcome too. -- ========================,,============================================ SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto TRANSIT `-O----------O---' purslowatcadotinterdotnet
