Now your drive is readable and writable by closed systems and by open source systems utilizing additional (and as-yet unsanctioned by Microsoft) kernel modules.Ī common filesystem native to Linux is ext4. Once you have exFAT support installed, you can create an exFAT filesystem on your drive in the partition you created.
Microsoft has not submitted exFAT code to any open source kernel, so you may have to install exFAT support with your package manager, but support for exFAT is included in both Windows and MacOS. If you want a drive to be compatible across many systems, then your only choice right now is the exFAT filesystem. This disconnect notwithstanding, there are lots of filesystems you can use, and the one you choose depends on the drive's purpose. Some companies decline to support open source filesystems, so their users can't read from open filesystems, while open source users can't read from closed ones without reverse-engineering them.
Some are free and open source, while others are not. If you run lsblk again (you may have to unplug the drive and plug it back in), you'll see that your drive now has one partition on it. # parted /dev/sdx -a opt mkpart primary 2048s 4G Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance: 1s % 2048s != 0s # parted /dev/sdx -a opt mkpart primary 0 4G If your start and end choices are not optimal, parted warns you and asks if you want to make adjustments. Since the -align opt flag is used, parted will adjust the size as needed to optimize drive performance, but these numbers serve as a guideline. The desired start and end points of the partition are defined last. This example uses the msdos label because it's a very compatible and popular label, although gpt is becoming more common. The mklabel command creates a partition table (called a disk label) on the device. The -align option lets parted find the partition's optimal starting and stopping point. This command specifies the device path first, as required by parted. The combinations are nearly endless.Īssuming your drive is 4GB, you can create one big partition from a terminal with the GNU parted command: # parted /dev/sdx -align opt mklabel msdos 0 4G For instance, if you have a 4GB thumb drive, you can have a partition on that device taking up the entire drive (4GB), two partitions that each take 2GB (or 1 and 3, if you prefer), three of some variation of sizes, and so on.
The lsblk command is nondestructive and used only for probing, so you can run it without any fear of ruining data on a drive. If you're not sure what a partition is, that's OK-just keep reading. For example, the second partition of the first drive is sda2. Each partition of each drive is assigned a number, starting with 1. The device identifiers are listed in the left column, each beginning with sd, and ending with a letter, starting with a.