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

[Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@ist.utl.pt>]

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?

-- 
Nuno Silva