Problem formatting a USB stick ext3

[xenial]

Ok
I have created a partition on my usb stick to see if i can just store general data and i am getting orange exclamation marks.
i tried formatting to ext 3 but no good.
Should i be partitioning as another primary or as an extended partitiion?

any ideas?

[xenial]

Just to clarify,
I have posted a pic of my present situation on the usb.
I wish to use the unallocated space to store data and perhaps run portable browsers from.

Screenshot.png (36.87 KiB) Viewed 1032 times

I have created a new partition and formatted to ext 3 and i get errors.

[williwaw]

can you describe the error in more detail?
maybe a pic of the orange exclamation marks?

[mikeslr]

Ok
I have created a partition on my usb stick [Emphasis Added] to see if i can just store general data and i am getting orange exclamation marks.
i tried formatting to ext 3 but no good.
Should i be partitioning as another primary or as an extended partitiion?

any ideas?

Per the screenshot on your 2nd post, you have a USB-Stick? of +/- 2 terabytes. Or is it an external USB-Drive? Or has something gone wrong so that gparted is misreading the size of the drive?

At any rate, have you tried to create a New Partition smaller than the remaining 1.66 Terabytes? If your trying to format using Xenialpup32's built-in gparted, I'm not sure it can manage that large a partition, especially if it "thinks" its working with a USB-Stick.

[xenial]

@mikeslr
Hi mike.
yeah it is a usb stick of 2 tereabytes,
I have tried creating a new partition of varying sizes of around 10gb on average.

I always end up with an exclamation mark and an error report..unable to read filesystem or needs f2sprogs whatever that may be.

[williams2]

What is showing orange exclamation marks? gparted? rox?

gpt allows 128 or more primary partitions, I think.
msdos partition table allows 4 primary partitions
or up to 3 primary partitions and an extended partition that can contain logical partitions (no limit to how many)

I would make a 2nd primary partition.
Is this where you have error messages? From gparted?

Then I would close gparted.
I would unplug the stick. Or better still, reboot, then plug it in.
I would run fdisk -l to see if it looks good. It should tell you if you have a gpt partition table or not.

If the partition looks ok, and if it's name is /dev/sdb2
I would try to format it like this (make sure the dev name is correct!):
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb2
or
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb2

If it seemed to format properly, I would try mounting it, like this:
mount-FULL /dev/sdb2 /mnt/data

i would use mount-FULL not mount because mount is a script and doesn't always work properly

If it seemed to mount ok, I would try copying files to and from /mnt/data. (or what ever mount-point you chose.)

if it seems to work, then I would unmount it using
umount-FULL /mnt/data/

[bigpup]

Looking at the Gparted image you posted.
It indicates you have the drive mounted.
Gparted cannot work on a mounted drive.

If you are booting and running from that drive.
You need to boot from Puppy installed on a different drive.
Then use Gparted in it.

[Phoenix]

Booting in RAM mode also works! Although the GParted version present by default then would be the built-in which is possibly bugged. (Particularly resizing fat32 partitions may give a nasty surprise when you transfer it to a Windows installation for access)