8 GB Flash drive formatted at 3.7 GB

Aaron Konstam akonstam at sbcglobal.net
Sun Dec 20 22:11:12 UTC 2009


On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 15:29 -0500, Marcel Rieux wrote: 
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 9:54 AM, Aaron Konstam <akonstam at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > On Sat, 2009-12-19 at 20:58 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >> On Saturday 19 December 2009, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> >> >On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 23:25 -0600, Robert G. (Doc) Savage wrote:
> >> >> On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 21:58 -0500, Marcel Rieux wrote:
> >> >> > On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Mikkel <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
> >> >> > > On 12/18/2009 01:59 PM, Marcel Rieux wrote:
> >> [...]
> >> >I thing borked is too pessimistic an analysis. There is a 4GB area on
> >> >the pen drive that is not partitioned nor is it formatted in any way,
> >> >according to fdisk. I wold just ignore the 4GB area and don;r worry
> >> >about it.
> >> >
> >> Huh?  In that case, why not 'd'elete that 1st 4Gb partition and make a new
> >> one 'n' that uses all the drive?  And the 't' to set it to type 83, then
> >> write that table to it with a 'w', exit fdisk, and mke2fs /dev/sdX1, where X
> >> is the same letter used for fdisk.  Voila! 8Gb unless it truly is a broken
> >> bit of tom-foolery.
> >>
> > The flash drive could be re-partitioned but to make its file type ext3
> > instead of Fat32 restricts what OS-s can read it.
> 
> Now that i know it's a 4GB drive, I wouldn't format it ext3, but since
> it's already formatted ext3 and I don't plan to use it  to exchange
> data, I'll leave it as it is.
I think there is another problem with having pen drives formatted ext3
or ext4. Pen drives can only tolerate a finite number of writes before
they crap out. Any format that involves journaling will increase the
number of writes to the pen drive and hasten its failure.
--
=======================================================================
When the fog came in on little cat feet last night, it left these little
muddy paw prints on the hood of my car.
=======================================================================
Aaron Konstam telephone: (210) 656-0355 e-mail: akonstam at sbcglobal.net




More information about the fedora-list mailing list