On 17/06/17 15:45, Gene Heskett wrote:
On Saturday 17 June 2017 10:24:11 Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:On 17/06/17 14:15, Gene Heskett wrote:Greetings all; See subject, on an rpi3b running raspian/jessie. I have a terabyte usb drive plugged in, and I want to set up an rsync cron job to backup the sd card to this drive and I need to reset the /dev/sda1 file system to vfat, which it is not ATM.Use fdisk to change the type to b or c and then mkfs.vfat to reformat it. Note however that Flash-based media might have the first partition start at a specific block since one of the early blocks has slightly different properties in order to accommodate frequent FAT updates, so if you know how the device was partitioned at the factory it's worth restoring to that if possible.Its been re-partition with gparted, 2 or 3 times. IIRC there is a small space, to align it or whatever in front of /dev/sda1. fdisk has a longer and whiter beard than I do, and I wasn't aware it had been to school to learn the new partition schemes?
There's lots of different fdisk implementations. On PC-like systems it was originally supplied by the hardware manufacturer i.e. Zenith or Compaq's fdisk wasn't quite the same as IBMs.
fdisk is installed and seems to recognize everything including a 2048 (sectors?) gap in front of sda1. Perhaps thats pristine yet?
https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/KernelArchived/Projects/FlashCardSurvey plus the link bear the top.
I've spent a lot of time extracting speed info from SDCard tests over the last couple of months, and can confirm that there /are/ differences in the way that the first few blocks are set up. I've not yet extended this to "stick" devices, and I don't think it's of Earth-shattering importance for devices which are only going to be used for occasional writes and isn't at all relevant if a device is being reformatted as e.g. ext4.
What I can say that is relevant to most people running RPis or anything else which uses an SDCard is that with certain access patterns I was able to get a reproducible glitch of roughly 500 mSec while the card handled block erase etc. I suspect that it's power loss during that 500 mSec, which might extend beyond OS shutdown, that's resulted in people suddenly finding they'd got a dud card.
So the rsync source is the sd card, and the target is this hard drive. Does this warning still apply? I did a t[return], l[return[ but do not see the desired vfat listed as a choice. Is it a synonym for something else?
apropos fsck and then look at the manpages it lists.
OTOH, one should file a bug against fdisk as the description string is printed at a reduced width, losing valuable information about the individual filesystem to use on a given partition.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]