[Linux-usb-users] 4 GB USB flash disk with FAT ok, with ext3 corrupted files

[Alan Stern]

On Sat, 16 Jun 2007, Miernik wrote:

> Posting now to two lists, one about USB and the other about ext3 as I
> don't know what is the source of the problem.
> 
> Miernik <public at miernik.name> wrote:
> > I recently bought 2 different USB flash disks. These are some cheap no-name
> > devices.  Their parameters:
> > 
> >   bytes            C/H/S       ID
> > 4288676352      1023/132/62     Vendor: USB     Model: USB 2.0          Rev: 1.00  ANSI SCSI revision: 02
> 
> Right now after trying to copy about 0.5 GB of files to a freshly created ext3
> filesystem on the device, this is the output of dmesg:
...
> EXT3-fs error (device sda1): ext3_new_block: block(1046522) >= blocks count(1046521) - block_group = 31, es == d8f5d400 
> EXT3-fs error (device sda1): ext3_new_block: block(1046523) >= blocks count(1046521) - block_group = 31, es == d8f5d400 

> And trying to write any more files gives "No space left on device" message,
> while only 8% of the device is used:
> 
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda1              4120356    305988   3605064   8% /mnt/sda1

This doesn't seem to be a USB error.  Look at the ext3 error message.  
It's complaining about a block number being out of range, not any sort 
of I/O problem.

Also I have no idea where that value of 1046521 for the total block
count came from.  These are 4-KB size blocks; converting to 1-KB blocks
gives 4186084, which is larger than than total size listed above for
/dev/sda1.  The output from "fdisk -l /dev/sda" would come in useful 
here.

Alan Stern