[SOLVED] 64-gig flash problems

perbh · 09-19-2014, 10:38 PM

I like to carry my own slackware on a flash-drive - I have done it with 32-gig drives with no problems whatsoever.
With time though, one becomes a tad more greedy and I now have a 64-gig drive - and it has caused nothing but problems (in-fact, I have _two_ and both are equally bad).

First I partition the drive, install grub and swap and then proceed to untar a tarball of one of my 32-gig slackwares. Usually, after a while, it ends in complete disaster with a corrupted filesystem, and I have tried them all (ext3, ext4, jfs, reiserfs, xfs)

My partitioning looks like this:

Code:

1: 64M ('grub'-partition)
2: 2 GB (swap)
3: 20 GB (root filesystem)
4: 42 GB (to be mounted as /work, xfs)

Allready here troubles begin, partition #4 can easily enough be created and formatted as xfs. However, if I remove the drive and insert it again - it can no longer be mounted (corrupted filesystem!)

Occasionally, the untar operation will work and I heave a sigh of relief. However, after chroot'ing to create an initrd -> corruption. If I use one of my initrd's from a 32-gig drive, I can try to boot the sucker, but it never successfully boots and always end up with a corrupted filesystem.

I have done the same with external usb-drives (up to 2 TB) with no problems at all.
Is there some strange firmware that may be the cause? (OK, they both come from two different Hong-Kong suppliers, 16 bucks!) They arrived with a single partition with exfat.

Which leads me to my next problem:
I decided to just use them for normal 'storage' - but then linux has rather poor exfat support. Yes, there is a sbo-solution (fuse-exfat and exfat-utils). However, 'scons' (also a sbopkg) is required, but this just refuses to install (its complaining about lack of man-pages, which ought not to matter too much, but anyhow, I have had no luck with it ...)
Has anyone tried successfully to make exfat work? I don't want to try any of the more 'usual' filesystems since this has just brought me grief so far.

Didier Spaier · 09-20-2014, 12:40 AM

I'd just try to make a fresh installation of Slackware on the 64 GB USB stick, then copy there files from the 32 GB USB stick. That's assuming you have a least 2 USB slots available

Out of curiosity, where's the need to use grub in this use case?

perbh · 09-20-2014, 11:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Didier Spaier

I'd just try to make a fresh installation of Slackware on the 64 GB USB stick, then copy there files from the 32 GB USB stick. That's assuming you have a least 2 USB slots available

Out of curiosity, where's the need to use grub in this use case?

*chuckles* Not any _real_ need - as such, it's only that old habits die hard! I have - ever since the birth of grub (legacy) - used it this way. Then (being a true distro-hoe), whenever I replace/update the distro, I let it install its own bootloader to the partition with the root filesystem and chainload to there from my grub-partition. Especially since the birth of grub2, which is soooo all encompassing that if you remove/replace your OS, all the grub2-stuff disappears with it. grub (legacy) is a complete standalone bootloader, you just need an OS to install it.

Yup - I haven't actually tried a complete install yet (guess I should), but in my googling I found (after I posted here) that other people seem to have problems with flash-devices >32GB - seems to be some obscure firmware in them that will only allow (to a certain extent) exfat to be used ...

I have about 4 different carry-along 16GB and 32GB flash devices with Slackware(TM) on them, and I have never had any problems whatsoever - doing it the same way as I tried with the 64GB ... - there just seem to be something rather 'fishy' with anything that comes with exfat *sigh* (hmmm, do I see a slight M$ intrusion here?)

Actually, I had also bought a cartridge-looking 32GB (hey, I live in TX!) flash-drive (also from HK) - it came with exfat and I could never make that work either - I thought it was a dud so discarded it - wrote it off as a bad experience, but now I start to wonder - there might be more to M$ than meets the eye ...

perbh · 09-22-2014, 11:08 AM

Re my '2nd point' (about exfat) - that was just me being stooopid and going the easy way (using sbopkg). If I just downloaded the 3 tarballs (scons, fuse-exfat, exfat-utils) and running the slackbuilds -> no problems. ie I can now do a mkfs, mount, read/write, umount on exfat with no problems.

However, the problems with using other filesystems still persist *sigh* - so, as far as _I_ can see - the culprit must be firmware

perbh · 09-22-2014, 01:25 PM

ohhhh - this might well be _my_ problem
(http://www.techspot.com/community/to...ioning.105214/)

Code:

Counterfeit USB Flash drives are really lower capacity flash drives (1GB - 4GB) hacked
to display as 64GB, usually sold from China via eBay. After filling up the flash drive's
actual capacity it fails.

Now I'm gonna make it into exfat and see how much I can copy to it ...

perbh · 09-23-2014, 11:03 AM

*big sigh* OK - I fell for it! My shiny 64 gig usb can take at most ~9-10 gigs :-(
The darn thing - not only does it lie to you about the capacity, the controller also does not issue any warnings when you write beyond the physical capacity. I did a

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=4M count=16000 of=/dev/sdf

and it happily wrote 64 gigs.
It means that if you ever come in the same situation, find a large movie-file and keep adding it to the fs (different filenames each time). When you get near the 1/4-mark, keep checking if you can see both the start an end of the file. The reasoning behind the 1/4-mark is that in order to make any profit when the price offered is half the usual, there is not much point delivering something that has half the capacity of the promised.

These fakes should just be thrown - many of them (appearantly) has a faulty memory as well (rejects), so even if you could use the actual capacity in it (9-10 gigs in my case), you could just never trust it to retain the information/files.

Lesson learned without too much of a monetary loss!