Are you sure you don't have a fake usb stick? A common problem are usb sticks that only have a fraction of the printed capacity.If you reach the end of the storage device, you get redirected to the beginning. badblks is happy with it, but filesystems are not. On 12/11/2015 02:25 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:
More backup woes.
I let badblks run overnight to verify a newly acquired large (128G) USB and am happy with the results.
Now I come to put a file system on it.
First, I try creating an ext4 file system. I'm going to play with various "T" options, but lets start with the basics.
I do the mkfs.ext4 taking defaults, when its done I sync and try mounting.
I get this
[63849.264471] JBD2: no valid journal superblock found [63849.264478] EXT4-fs (sdb1): error loading journal
Eh?
So I try with an explicit journal creation - "-j" and yes that makes a not about creating the journal appear on the CLI.
Again I try mounting. Same error.
I try combining with various "-T" options, various "-J". Same result.
For completeness, even though I'm a CLI guy and, as you can see, I'm minimalist, I try yast. That seems to create a ext4FS that it mounts. I look over the yast2 logs but they aren't easy to decipher. it seems that with yast EVERY parameter is there! far from minimalist!
HOWEVER ...
When I unmount and reinsert that USB I'm back to the old error message about no valid journal superblock. It seems Yast isn't that great after all.
Next up, I try mkfs.reiserfs with default settings. The resulting formatted USB mounts with no problem.
I'm hesitant to use that for backup despite the matter of inode exhaustion since the threading of reiserfs on the USB along with the reiserfs of /home can get knotted. Take that as it DOES, I just tried it.
Next up is XFS. Well XFS doesn't seem very USB-friendly. It formats, but when i try mounting it hangs. and I can't ctrl-C to get out of the mount loop.
So much for using a large USB stick for backups!
Any suggestions as to what might be the problem with ext4? Or XFS for that matter?
I'd really like a well balanced FS, and one problem I keep running into with many situations is inode exhaustion. Its why I've turned to reiserfs and do actually use BtrFS.