I bought a 256GB MicroSD card from Walmart recently, branded as 'Onn' which I suppose is a Walmart generic brand. I was able to format it as ext4, and then I tried to rsync to the card — which froze and corrupted the card.
I've had this happen before, where rsync is apparently too fast for the card and it corrupts it. So I reformatted, copied over my files, then moved the card to my PinePhone (which runs Mobian, a Debian distro), and it won't auto-mount, and I can only manually mount it as read-only.
So, I bought a Samsung EVO 256GB card from eBay. As soon as I got it, I removed the existing partitions, created a big, ext4 partition, and as soon as it was done, it said the system didn't have permission to mount the partition.
After this, every attempt to mount, from Nautilus or the command line, resulted in variations on this error message:
wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdf1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
I ran fdisk, fsck, e2fsck, and tried to repair the filesystem from the GUI. Nothing worked. The only think that worked was to run mkusb and restore the card to a standard storage device.
Here are my questions:
- The newer card shows up on my computer as 268GB, even though it's supposed to be a 256GB device. Is this a giveaway that it's a bootleg card? The packaging seemed legit and the seller was highly rated, but that seems suspicious to me.
- Is there an issue formatting an SD of this size as ext4? I have never heard of such a thing.
- Should I just leave the disk as FAT? I only use Linux for everything, so my impulse is to make everything ext4. I am going to put this disk in my PinePhone, and will be syncing to my server and to my computer, back-and-forth, and I have this idea that a FAT partition will store permissions differently and somehow complicate hte sync process. But that might be incorrect and it might just be standard to leave SD cards formatted the way they were purchased.
I'm running ubuntu 20.04.
exfat
?