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

[Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net>]

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.

-- 
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