On Fri, 20 Jul 2018 14:48:39 -0700 Ben Koenig <techkoe...@gmail.com> dijo:
>The first is that these USB drives are broken/poorly designed. You can >test this by using a completely different computer and/or OS to do the >format. > >The second is that your computer is failing to format them properly. >mkfs.ext2 and mkfs.ext4 are actually front ends to completely different >filesystem tools, so maybe something is screwy with your install? >Test this one by using your computer to format a completely different >USB drive. Give your computer a thumbdrive pop quiz, pass/fail. > >I'm more inclined to say that your USB drives are cheap pieces of >crap, but lately Ubuntu has been a cheap piece of crap too. Russell> A way to test that would be to re-create the 10GB (?) Russell> partition at the beginning, write zeros to it, partition the Russell> rest for your drive, see if that works, then go back and Russell> check if the bytes in the first partition are still zero. First, I have only Xubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 on two different computers and I get the same results on both. I do have Windows XP and 2000 in Virtualbox, but I don't think either could grok USB 3.0, not to mention getting the shares for external drives to work. (Been there a long time ago, tried that, gave up.) I'm not sure, but I think that the brand is Piece-o-Crap and the model is China Basement. The serial number of the one in my 16.04 laptop is D84A80BE and the one in my 18.04 desktop is AE937344. The one in the laptop is currently working with ext2 and a label created separately with tune2fs and Gnome Disk Utility. I could do the same with the one in the desktop, but haven't bothered pending more figuring out. Oh wait ... I just noticed that Gnome Disk Utility says the model is 'Generic Flash Disk (8.07).' Doesn't sound very helpful. I dimly recall when I started using Linux in 2005 that the reigning filesystem at the time was ext2. Later versions eventually appeared, and there was complaining that the new versions just added things on top of ext2 rather than rewriting the whole thing. I have probably misremembered or misunderstood parts of that because of brain leaks. Re re-creating the first partition, I said it was 10GB, but that was a rough guess because I just deleted it without bothering to write down exactly what it was. Then overnight I used Gnome Disk Utility to 'clean' the whole drive, which took about eight hours. Because of how long it would take I did one on the laptop and the other on the desktop. This morning I started working with the one on the laptop, leaving the other one untouched until I get the one on the laptop working right. My big question right now is why I can successfully format it ext2, but not ext4. I'm off to see if Duck Duck Go can shed light on that. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
