Mounting a USB disk: FAT32 ok, ext4 not...
by refaehei from LinuxQuestions.org on (#557Q2)
Hello,
Apologies if the answer is somewhere in the site, but I couldn't find it. I bought a 2TB Toshiba USB drive for my laptop's backups, and I am having some problems mounting it (I run Debian 10 with kernel 4.19.0-9-amd64).
First, I was unhappy with the writing speed, compared to other disks I have. Especially because after Ctrl-C a rsync local copy, it took several minutes for the drive to finish the copy and allow me to eject. I have an older drive that does not do that at all. I tried changing two system values, something called vm...bytes... as per some website, but no improvement.
Next, I decided to format it, and that's when things got weird for me. I went for ext4 (I will only use it in modern Linux computers). But upon plugging again, although it was automounted and opened in Dolphin, no writes were allowed, only as root.
I tried a couple of solutions for automount. Since it's external, based on things I read I left fstab for last, and I started by following https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/560380 to set up unit files (whatever they are). To make it short, it didn't work. In any case I've reformatted the drive a few times so that UUID is not valid any more, those files I set up won't interfere.
I also saw a suggestion on udev rules (?) but I couldn't find anything clear enough for me.
I plugged an older drive that I have, and since it works as it should, I checked it to see that it is ext3. So I tried formatting the new one (with GParted) but it took so very long (after a few hours, less than halfway) that I stopped it. After that I put it as FAT32 and it did work like a charm. Then back to ext4, back to only root.
Finally I tried fstab via the current UUID. For the mount options I tried "defaults" only, later "user" only, and still no writing for non-root. After that, FAT32 once more (all good), ext4 again (not good). On top of that, maybe in relation to having GParted open sometimes, for unmounting I am asked for the root password sometimes.
A lot of this is quite new for me (all I did was read and follow suggestions) so I am really stumped. If it turns out that FAT32 is not going to be significantly worse in capabilities or speed, I may well go with it. But I would really appreciate some pointers to the solution of the mystery, because I am very curious about it.
Thanks a lot!
Apologies if the answer is somewhere in the site, but I couldn't find it. I bought a 2TB Toshiba USB drive for my laptop's backups, and I am having some problems mounting it (I run Debian 10 with kernel 4.19.0-9-amd64).
First, I was unhappy with the writing speed, compared to other disks I have. Especially because after Ctrl-C a rsync local copy, it took several minutes for the drive to finish the copy and allow me to eject. I have an older drive that does not do that at all. I tried changing two system values, something called vm...bytes... as per some website, but no improvement.
Next, I decided to format it, and that's when things got weird for me. I went for ext4 (I will only use it in modern Linux computers). But upon plugging again, although it was automounted and opened in Dolphin, no writes were allowed, only as root.
I tried a couple of solutions for automount. Since it's external, based on things I read I left fstab for last, and I started by following https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/560380 to set up unit files (whatever they are). To make it short, it didn't work. In any case I've reformatted the drive a few times so that UUID is not valid any more, those files I set up won't interfere.
I also saw a suggestion on udev rules (?) but I couldn't find anything clear enough for me.
I plugged an older drive that I have, and since it works as it should, I checked it to see that it is ext3. So I tried formatting the new one (with GParted) but it took so very long (after a few hours, less than halfway) that I stopped it. After that I put it as FAT32 and it did work like a charm. Then back to ext4, back to only root.
Finally I tried fstab via the current UUID. For the mount options I tried "defaults" only, later "user" only, and still no writing for non-root. After that, FAT32 once more (all good), ext4 again (not good). On top of that, maybe in relation to having GParted open sometimes, for unmounting I am asked for the root password sometimes.
A lot of this is quite new for me (all I did was read and follow suggestions) so I am really stumped. If it turns out that FAT32 is not going to be significantly worse in capabilities or speed, I may well go with it. But I would really appreciate some pointers to the solution of the mystery, because I am very curious about it.
Thanks a lot!