[SOLVED] Unable to mount new reformatted 128GB USB stick.

tekra · 01-29-2020, 07:47 PM

The largest USB stick I've ever bought is 16GB, originally on need and price/performance, but later due to what appears to be an upper limit of some sort at 32GB. Until a couple of weeks ago, that is. I then decided to stop being a wimp and go macho, so ordered five 128GB USB ... well, they're not even a stick, just a tiny plug. Figured I wouldn't need to buy any more storage for quite a while.

BUT ... the best laid plans of meece and men gang aft aglee, as Rabbie Burns observed.

Plugged in the first, the PCManFM file manager mounted and displayed it (LXDE on Debian 10.1) and all seemed well. Then I invoked fdisk, wrote a new partition table with the three Lx (83) partitions on it that I want, and NONE of them mount! WOE!!

So, back into fdisk, rewrite a new table with a single exfat (7) partition, and THAT won't mount either. At this stage I confess to being well out-of-date, flummoxed, and in need of the sort of sage advice seldom found outside the hallowed halls of LinuxQuestions.com.

I've bpasted debug info here: https://controlc.com/34526e5a

Would much appreciate any comments or suggestions from others who may have had similar issues, or may know the sacred incantations needed to expel the demons and restore sanctity to my world.

syg00 · 01-29-2020, 07:59 PM

No evidence of mount failing. Issue a mount, post relevant dmesg or similar, especially for ext4.

The only slightly relevant 32G limit I can think of is M$oft limits FAT32 to that (or did) by default when formatting. Never been an issue on Linux.

tekra · 01-29-2020, 08:22 PM

A lot of my 'toys' (music players etc) have stated an upper limit of 32GB on SD cards. Maybe something to do with file system numbering limits, requiring an adjustment of e.g. sector size (change 512 bytes to 1024 bytes) in order to lower the numbers.

The only difference in the debug info I can see is that the original format used a start sector of 32:

Code:

/dev/sda1  *       32 262143999 262143968  125G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

... whereas my reformat resulted in 2048:

Code:

/dev/sda1        2048 262143999 262141952  125G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

This overwrites the ... umm, secondary boot sector or whatever - been a while. Block devices can be formatted whole (/dev/sda) or partitioned (/dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 etc) so maybe at this size ye canna have such big willies, me lad?

(ADDED) A clue may be that 'mount' reports a 'block size' of 4096. Does block size = sector size? I recall such things as 'allocation units' but can't remember just what they were:

Code:

qtm:~># m
/dev/sdb3 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro) [Debian10.1]
  :   
/dev/sde1 on /media/root/76E8-CACF type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096,uhelper=udisks2)
qtm:~>#

Dunno. I agree with your statement that there APPEARS to be no theoretical issue I'm aware of, but I've repeated this procedure with identical results, and am, as I said, stymied.

michaelk · 01-29-2020, 08:50 PM

fdisk just creates partitions, it does not create a filesystem. Use mkfs to actual format the partition and create the filesystem.

In simple terms a partition is just a container for the filesystem.

tekra · 01-29-2020, 09:01 PM

> fdisk just creates partitions, it does not create a filesystem.

Crikey! My sincere apologies to everyone and grateful thanks to michaelk. Its' been five years since I did this stuff: new system, new hardware, new ... OK, that's it! I'll INSIST that the doctor change my new medication.