8 GB Flash drive formatted at 3.7 GB

[Marcel Rieux]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 4:31 AM, Robert G. (Doc) Savage
<dsavage at peaknet.net> wrote:

> Are you quite certain yours is an 8 GB device??

Arrrgh! Since you asked, I thought I'd check.. and it's indeed a 4 GB!

I bought this drive at Future Shop, more commonly known as Future
Shark. The price, $10 (CAN) seemed really unbelievable for an 8GB
drive, mainly ~2 years ago, but it now appears inside the package was
a 4GB drive.

It's still a good price but then often acts weirdly. For some time, I
had the capacity reading at 17 GB with also a reading of about twice
what was written on it.

I had and still have problems with e2fsck:

e2fsck -c /dev/sdb
e2fsck 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009)
e2fsck: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate
superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

==================

Wouldn't it be a good thing if I used fdisk to change -- what is it
called? -- the label co that everything matches?

Last word on Future Shop: BEWARE. They sell junk and crap. I once
bought 50 Mitsumi CDs from them and half of the pile ended as
coasters. Of course, I'd never buy a computer there, but it seems you
end up being ripped off even on the small stuff.