Re: [gentoo-user] format usb as ext4

[Mitchell Dorrell <mwd@psc.edu>]

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On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 10:35 PM syscon edm <syscon780@gmail.com> wrote:

> It was my error, the command should be:
> mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda
> The usb was auto-mounted as soon as the command finished.
>

You can format the whole thing (/dev/sda) as one big ext4 volume, yes, but
unless I'm very mistaken, that's not standard practice. USB storage devices
usually have a partition table with one or more partitions defined. The
first partition would be /dev/sda1, so the usual commands to format such a
partition would use /dev/sda1, not /dev/sda.

Since you're formatting it as ext4, I suppose you only intend to use this
on Linux machines. I guess it's probably OK to format the whole device as
ext4, without any partition table. However, I would definitely advise
against it for any USB device you might use in a cross-platform
environment. I have no idea whether you can skip the partition table and
still be usable with computers running Windows or Mac OS or with embedded
systems like home printers or commercial photo kiosks.

-MD

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