I just bought a Kingston 32GB USB stick. It was formatted as FAT32. I deleted the single partition with fdisk, started a new Linux partition and wrote it. I then tried to format it as ext2 using mkfs. It locked up and I had to pull it out to try again. Same result. I tried ext4. Same result. I tried mkfs.vfat and it worked, but I don’t want a FAT32 file structure. I then started YaST and tried the same thing using the partitioner only to fail again. It will format an XFS file system but as I am unfamiliar with its structure I would like to use an ext version. The package states support for only WinDoze and Mac so I suspect I can’t return it.
Any explanation and suggestions for a solution would be appreciated.
While I understand that you used fdisk to remove the only partition that was there, maybe completly removing the partition table would help:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1
And take care! that X must be the correct letter for your device, do not destroy your system!!!
After wards, you could use fdisk to create a new partition table with one (or more) partitions and then use mkfs to create the file system(s) on it, or YaST.
There seems to be something in that MBR/partition block that can block things. It seems also that nobody here (there are several threads around) really knows what it is. But as in all of these cases a complete reorganisation of the device was wanted, thoroughly removing that block is easier/faster then finding out what it exactly is.
On 2015-05-04 13:16, hcvv wrote:
>
> ionmich;2708232 Wrote:
>> Thank you Henk. That was very good advice and it worked.
> Nice it worked.
>
> There seems to be something in that MBR/partition block that can block
> things. It seems also that nobody here (there are several threads
> around) really knows what it is. But as in all of these cases a complete
> reorganisation of the device was wanted, thoroughly removing that block
> is easier/faster then finding out what it exactly is.
Interesting…
Often I create an image on hard disk of new and empty usb sticks before
formatting them, so that I can revert the operation (as the image is
full of zeroes, it compresses terribly).
In this case, such an image could perhaps be used to investigate the
reason for the problem.
Maybe there was something in the log :-?
There is something I know that might be related, or maybe not.
USB sticks are in fact optimized for the FAT filesystem. Every file
write (if it implies a file size change) implies a write to the FAT area
as well. As flash supports a limited number of writes, the FAT wears out
first.
(People see this when they use the sticks to work on them. Say,
edit a word document on the stick. I have seen sticks break down
relatively early because of this — we thought.
The recommendation is to work on the hard disk, then copy
the file to the stick. Not work on the stick.)
Well, what the manufacturer does is implement the flash area where the
FAT will be placed to have smaller chunks, and it is made more resilient
to writes (I do not know how; perhaps remapping or spreading).
Thus I’m afraid that placing Linux filesystems on sticks will wear them
differently. Don’t know if better of worse. The documentation where I
read about the issue didn’t say.