From: Henrik.Carlqvist@deadspam.com   
      
   On Sun, 04 Dec 2022 00:54:51 +0000, John Smith wrote:   
   > 	I initially concluded that the drive may be a lemon, but the fact   
   > is that it can be formatted as FAT32 without any problems. And as FAT32   
   > I can use it without issues, but of course with the limitations of   
   > FAT32.   
   >   
   > 	Any ideas on why the ext4 filesystem creation may be getting   
   > stuck, and how to diagnose and hopefully fix it? Alternatively, what   
   > other filesystem could I try to use that is better than FAT32?   
      
   Putting a file system on a partition does not mean writing to every byte   
   of that partition and writing different file systems might write to   
   different bytes. If you have some unwritable bytes on the drive, even if   
   you are able to put a file system on it you might get trouble later.   
      
   If you wan't ext4, you might be able to run badblocks on the partition   
   during creation of the file system, it will make the creation slower, but   
   if you suspect a bad drive I would use the option "-c" twice to mke2fs to   
   do a slow read-write test on the entire drive.   
      
   As you have disabled the journal on the file system you might just as   
   well consider the ext2 file system.   
      
   When mke2fs seems hung and unkillable you can still look for clues about   
   what is going on.   
      
   Maybe the output from the command "dmesg" can give some clue.   
      
   ls -al /proc/`pidof mke2fs`/fd   
      
   might show which file descriptor is pointing to the partition and if that   
   is say number 7 you can study the contents of:   
      
   cat /proc/`pidof mke2fs`/fdinfo/7   
      
   ...to see if something happens to the file position.   
      
   Another tool to see if something is going on is strace:   
      
   strace -f -p `pidof mke2fs`   
      
   regards Henrik   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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