I can't find a link to share at the moment, but I remember reading some comments from an interview with one of the EXT4 developers where he said that while there are some issues, EXT4 is extremely robust when it comes to recovering from data corruption.
Basically he was saying that it tends to be pretty magically when replaying the journal, but still gets corrupted. This means that data gets corrupted for everybody, but depending on your use case the journal replay feature will either magically fix the problem or catastrophically fail. Back to Rich's original question though.... you don't configure your filesystem with fdisk. If you already have drives that are actively in use then you can leave the partitions alone, and just reformat with mkfs. Slackware also includes several /sbin/mkfs.* programs as front ends to whatever filesystem you intend to use. bash-5.1$ ls -l /sbin/mkfs* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 14664 Feb 15 2022 /sbin/mkfs -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 35408 Feb 15 2022 /sbin/mkfs.bfs -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 532576 Jan 15 2022 /sbin/mkfs.btrfs -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 39480 Feb 15 2022 /sbin/mkfs.cramfs -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 35184 Nov 17 2021 /sbin/mkfs.exfat lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Feb 18 2022 /sbin/mkfs.ext2 -> mke2fs lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Feb 18 2022 /sbin/mkfs.ext3 -> mke2fs lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Feb 18 2022 /sbin/mkfs.ext4 -> mke2fs lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Feb 18 2022 /sbin/mkfs.ext4dev -> mke2fs -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 44144 Feb 13 2021 /sbin/mkfs.f2fs -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 56592 Feb 13 2021 /sbin/mkfs.fat lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Feb 18 2022 /sbin/mkfs.jfs -> jfs_mkfs -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 109664 Feb 15 2022 /sbin/mkfs.minix lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Feb 18 2022 /sbin/mkfs.msdos -> mkfs.fat lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Jun 24 15:05 /sbin/mkfs.ntfs -> /sbin/mkntfs lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Feb 18 2022 /sbin/mkfs.reiserfs -> mkreiserfs lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Feb 18 2022 /sbin/mkfs.vfat -> mkfs.fat -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 486904 Aug 21 2021 /sbin/mkfs.xfs See the manpages. You don't need fdisk unless you want to change parition sizes/settings. Once mkfs has been run and the new drive is mounted, linux should handle the translation between filesystems seamlessly. -Ben ------- Original Message ------- On Tuesday, September 19th, 2023 at 1:35 PM, Michael Ewan <[email protected]> wrote: > I am glad you have not had any problems. I have had the opposite > experience with ext4 but never a problem with xfs, hence my suggestion. > > On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 1:25 PM Rich Shepard [email protected] > > wrote: > > > On Tue, 19 Sep 2023, Michael Ewan wrote: > > > > > You will ultimately have problems with a corrupted file system with ext4, > > > almost guaranteed. Xfs is a much more robust file system but if you do > > > not > > > trust it, then try zfs or btrfs. > > > > Michael, > > > > I've used ext2, ext3, and ext4 with no issues on any of them. I'll stay > > with > > what's worked flawlessly with me since 1997. > > > > Thanks, > > > > Rich
