I have an iball 256mb usb drive. I had previously installed slax on it and now want to install a later version. But when i formatted the drive with both fdisk and cfdisk they had both created 253mb partitions called sda1. But whenever i mount it df -ha shows that the partition is only 179mb. I have tried rebooting the computer since fdisk said the table would be read on next reboot but it fails. I am using suse 10, does the automounting as soon as a device is detected have anything to do with this problem
Thanks, Nikhil
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates ------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 09:11 +0530, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
I have an iball 256mb usb drive. I had previously installed slax on it and now want to install a later version. But when i formatted the drive with both fdisk and cfdisk they had both created 253mb partitions called sda1.
*fdisk only create partitions.
But whenever i mount it df -ha shows that the partition is only 179mb.
What filesystem did you create i.e. ext2, ext3, jfs, xfs, reiserfs? The journaling fs have an overhead - about 33MB for ext3 and reiserfs. Nevertheless, the number you have posted suggest there could be some problems with the USB drive. Try reformatting with 'mke2fs -c -c' to check for bad blocks.
On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 09:11 +0530, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
I have an iball 256mb usb drive. I had previously installed slax on it and
But whenever i mount it df -ha shows that the partition is only 179mb.
What filesystem did you create i.e. ext2, ext3, jfs, xfs, reiserfs? The journaling fs have an overhead - about 33MB for ext3 and reiserfs.
Unless you have created a smaller partition, the most likely chances are that you have used a journal Filesystem.
It is very *un-advisable* to create a Journaled FS on a Flash Disk Because of the higher overhead of I/O operations. You will lose a LOT of mileage on your flash drive. Stick to ext2 on the flash drives if you value the life of your drive, otherwise expect it to give problems fast.
-Erle
I chose fs number 83 in the cfdisk menu. cfdisk only says Linux so i have no idea whether its ext2/3.
On 3/24/06, Erle Pereira biz@erlepereira.com wrote:
On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 09:11 +0530, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
I have an iball 256mb usb drive. I had previously installed slax on it
and
But whenever i mount it df -ha shows that the partition is only 179mb.
What filesystem did you create i.e. ext2, ext3, jfs, xfs, reiserfs? The journaling fs have an overhead - about 33MB for ext3 and reiserfs.
Unless you have created a smaller partition, the most likely chances are that you have used a journal Filesystem.
It is very *un-advisable* to create a Journaled FS on a Flash Disk Because of the higher overhead of I/O operations. You will lose a LOT of mileage on your flash drive. Stick to ext2 on the flash drives if you value the life of your drive, otherwise expect it to give problems fast.
-Erle
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates ------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 12:52 +0530, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
I chose fs number 83 in the cfdisk menu. cfdisk only says Linux so i have no idea whether its ext2/3.
83 is a partition label identifying that the disk partition is meant for a "valid" Linux filesystem. Likewise 82 is for Linux swap.
After creating the partition you still *need* to format the partition with mkfs -t <type> (man mkfs for details).
From your response, apparently you have not formatted the partition
after creating it with fdisk/cfdisk. You probably have some old filesystem that the Linux kernel is recognizing and auto mounting it.
To verify that the USB drive is good: Caveat: back up any valuable files before doing this test.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1 count=256000000
where /dev/sda is the device your USB drive is recognized as by the kernel.
This will write 256MB (in disk manufac. parlance) on the disk. Likewise you can also read from USB drive (man dd for details). dd will fail if it encounters HW errors.
HTH
Thanks a lot everyone, after you said it had to be formatted i realised that i had created a journalising fs on it, i got it working now.
THanks, Nikhil -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates ------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Friday 24 March 2006 10:43, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
Thanks a lot everyone, after you said it had to be formatted i realised that i had created a journalising fs on it, i got it working now.
One piece of friendly advice. Stick to FAT32.
P.S.: No flames please.
On 3/25/06, Dinesh Joshi dinesh.a.joshi@gmail.com wrote:
One piece of friendly advice. Stick to FAT32.
P.S.: No flames please.
No flames ... just a query. Wasn't there some noise about M$ wanting to charge royalty for using it's *propietary* filesystem on USB drives??
- farazs
On Saturday 25 March 2006 6:56 am, Dinesh Joshi wrote:
On Friday 24 March 2006 10:43, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
Thanks a lot everyone, after you said it had to be formatted i realised that i had created a journalising fs on it, i got it working now.
One piece of friendly advice. Stick to FAT32.
If u wanna exchange data with windoz. Anyway u are going to have plenty of fun recovering data when the usb crashes.
JTD wrote:
On Saturday 25 March 2006 6:56 am, Dinesh Joshi wrote:
One piece of friendly advice. Stick to FAT32.
If u wanna exchange data with windoz. Anyway u are going to have plenty of fun recovering data when the usb crashes.
The portable drive should not be used for long term storing of data. It should be used only as a transport drive. If it is used as a proper OS HDD by 'high security' ;) operators, then they must backup the data regularly on a cd or dvd.
Regards,
Rony.
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Dinesh Joshi wrote:
On Friday 24 March 2006 10:43, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
Thanks a lot everyone, after you said it had to be formatted i realised that i had created a journalising fs on it, i got it working now.
One piece of friendly advice. Stick to FAT32.
P.S.: No flames please.
I agree. FAT32 will get the usb drive automatically mounted on any machine, windows or linux, subject to the OS having auto mounting features. NTFS too should work, my client recently got a Hitachi portable 40 GB usb HDD for 3K9 and the shop guy formatted it with ntfs. It can be detected automatically by XP as well as Ubuntu 5.10.
Regards,
Rony.
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On Saturday 25 March 2006 14:29, Rony Bill wrote:
I agree. FAT32 will get the usb drive automatically mounted on any machine, windows or linux, subject to the OS having auto mounting features. NTFS too should work, my client recently got a Hitachi portable 40 GB usb HDD for 3K9 and the shop guy formatted it with ntfs. It can be detected automatically by XP as well as Ubuntu 5.10.
Yes, NTFS works pretty well but there is one problem. NTFS write support is still not stable. Only some bleeding edge distros have it. So FAT32 seems a better choice.
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Arun K. Khan -
Dinesh Joshi -
Erle Pereira -
Faraz Shahbazker -
JTD -
Nikhil Marathe -
Rony Bill