2 GIG limit on usb thumb drives?

John Conover conover at rahul.net
Wed Mar 25 09:06:27 UTC 2009


Eberhard Roloff writes:
> Owen Townend wrote:
> > 2009/3/25 John Conover <conover at rahul.net>:
> >> I can mount 2 gig usb thumb drives, but not 4 gig. Same manufacturer,
> >> only size is different.
> >>
> >> Is there a 2 gig limit?
> >>
> >>   Thanks,
> >>
> >>   John
> > 
> > I currently have a 16 gig usb thumb drive plugged in here without
> > issue, so it must be something else.
> > What error messages do you get if you try to mount it from the command line?
> > 
> > N.B. One thing that's common:
> > NTFS formatted drives that aren't unmounted cleanly will refuse to
> > mount unless forced or mounted/removed from a windows machine
> > 
> also your 2 GB limit reminds me of the old FAT32 problem, that 
> partitions of more than 2GB cannot work properly.
> 
> Check what filesystem your 4GB thumb drive is formatted with. If it is 
> FATxx, change it to ext3. Should you also work with a Win NT/2k/XP/Vista 
> machine, ntfs is a better choice.
>

Thanks, Owen. Its a W95 FAT32 (LBA), according to fdisk(8), and
doesn't work. The 2 GB pen drive is FAT16, and works. I just fdisk'ed
and mkfs'ed to a FAT16 4 GB, and am filling it up to see if it
crashes. Using FAT16 with a 4 GB device is scary.

	 Thanks,

	 John

BTW, what started this is that I need to store about 3 GB, and had a 2 GB
that was reliable. Found a 4-same brand, same case, but didn't work.

-- 

John Conover, conover at rahul.net, http://www.johncon.com/




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