Note: ‘/dev/ sdc1‘ is the partition path, make sure to replace it accordingly. Sudo mkfs -t ext4 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0 /dev/ sdc1 Be careful, though, if you enter a wrong partition path, then you will lose its data in a short while!!), enter the below command to re-format it (again remember, this will destroy all of its data):
Windows format external hard drive ext4 how to#
But if you are okay with formatting the drive, then you can follow the below procedure to force ‘Ext4’ to create the whole ‘index node’ while formatting the drive (or individual partitions, mine only contains a single partition) and that will be the end of it.Īssuming that you know how to find the path of the partition that should be re-formatted (if you don’t, then use the sudo blkid command and carefully have a look to find it. If you cannot afford that (say that you have already filled it up and don’t have anywhere else to backup the data), then the best solution is to just let ‘ext4lazyinit’ do its thing, and it will finish things up, eventually. Nonetheless, if you are interested, then there is a fix, though for it to work, you need to re-format the file system, and that is going to destroy the data on it (obviously). And also, power failures do occur from time to time where I live, and who knows, they could corrupt the ‘index node’. So in theory, there is nothing to worry about.īut personally, I like to keep things simple, and the sooner a job is finished, the better. This will happen on and on, until the whole ‘index node’ is created. By default it is supposed to write to the disk using about 16 Mb/s (though here it was between 11-14 Mb/s).įor newer hard drives this is a reasonably small percentage of their total write speed (about 11% for my WD My Passport Ultra series), thus the users can carry on their tasks without significant delays. If this process gets interrupted, then it ‘Ext4’ will carry it on the next time it is mounted. And as soon as the file system gets mounted, ‘Ext4’ silently creates the rest of the ‘index node’ using ‘ext4lazyinit’. So as a fix, when formatting a drive, ‘Ext4’ creates a basic ‘index node’ only, one that is just enough to mount the file system and get things going. However, creating an ‘index node’ when formatting a large partition (1 TB in this instance) could take a while and therefore can delay the formatting process. You see, when creating a file system in GNU/Linux, a special kind of index gets created called ‘index node’, without which a file system cannot hold data. A little Googling conformed my suspicion, it was indeed an ‘Ext4’ related process, finishing things up from the background.
And as soon as I opened it, ‘iotop’ listed a process called ‘ext4lazyinit’ that was consuming a mild I/O bandwidth (about 11-13 Mb/s) out of my WD USB hard disk.ĭue to its name and since it was a newly formatted file system, I suspected that it probably had something to do with the ‘Ext4’ file system. So in an attempt to isolate its cause, I used the ‘ iotop‘ utility (it’s a tool that sorts & lists processes by their disk I/O consumption).
And on all these instances the LED kept blinking non-stop for minutes and the only way stop it was to detach the USB disk from the computer. I ignored it the first time, but every time I mounted the drive, it happened again and again. What happened was that, after formatting the drive into ‘Ext4’, whenever I mounted the USB disk, even when I was not using it, the LED starts to indicate (by blinking) a mild disk activity. To be honest, I never had used a native GNU/Linux file system on a large USB hard disk before, thus, after creating an ‘Ext4’ file system on the 1TB USB drive, I made an interesting (and irritating) observation.
Windows format external hard drive ext4 windows#
I recently purchased a Western Digital My Passport Ultra (1TB, USB 3.0) external hard disk as I was running out of space to save my files. Although I dual-boot a GNU/Linux distribution (which is the awesome Fedora 21 nowadays) with Windows 8.1, and almost all of my friends rely on the Windows operating system, I took the decision to format it into ‘Ext4’ anyway, despite having the obvious drawback to which I am bound (that would be sharing data of course 🙂 ).
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