Re: [gentoo-user] Re: problem formatting new 256 GB USB stick

[Michael <confabulate@kintzios.com>]

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On Saturday 15 February 2025 11:50:23 Greenwich Mean Time Nuno Silva wrote:
> On 2025-02-15, Philip Webb wrote:
> > Recently, I bought  2  new Kingston Exodia  256 GB  USB sticks
> > from Canada Computers, the store in Toronto I've used for  25 yr .
> > With many previous new USB sticks of sizes  <= 128 GB
> > & which came with a VFat filesystem,
> > I simply repartitioned them using Fdisk, which created a Linux partition
> > & then used 'mke2fs' to format them with an Ext2 filesystem.
> > 
> > This time, something has gone wrong :
> >   root:538 ~> mke2fs /dev/sdb1
> >   mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
> >   Creating filesystem with 60567296 4k blocks and 15147008 inodes
> >   Filesystem UUID: 80c2f275-ed6b-4ef5-b785-b53bd225ca9e
> >   Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376,
> >   294912,
> >   
> >     819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424,
> >     20480000, 23887872
> >   
> >   Allocating group tables: done
> >   Writing inode tables: done
> >   
> >   Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information:
> >     mke2fs: Input/output error while writing out and closing file system
> > 
> > I tried repartitioning the stick into  2 x 128 GB  partitions,
> > in case it was the sheer size which was the problem, but got the same
> > result. The error occured with both sticks, so it doesn't seem to be bad
> > hardware. It took  10 h 40 m  to process the  256 GB  part'n on my 2023
> > desktop machine, so trying suggestions cb a rather long-drawn-out affair
> > (smile).
> > 
> > Has anyone else encountered this ?  Does anyone have suggestions ?
> 
> Are there kernel error or warning messages when this happens?

An ext2fs with 4K block size has a maximum filesystem size limit of 16TiB.  
Your 256GB drive will not experience a formatting problem because of its size.

Formatting a 256GB USB drive, especially if it is a USB 3.0 or later spec, 
should not take hours, but minutes if not seconds.  Assuming there was no 
power cut or interruption to the formatting operation the error has the smell 
of a hardware problem, hence dmesg should reveal if something went wrong with 
the device.

You can try reformatting the USB drive, while keeping an eye on the output of 
'dmesg -W'.

If both of these sticks are behaving the same way, it could be the port on 
your PC which has a problem.  You can try using a different USB port to 
eliminate this causing the formatting failure.

Other than a hardware problem with the device itself, there is the chance of 
counterfeit USB drives, churned out at volume and having a smaller size and 
speed than advertised, or such poor quality flash chips they end up corrupting 
data.  Usually they survive a reformat, at least with FAT, but can fail at any 
point thereafter.

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