VirtualBox

64 GiB USB 3.1 stick and VM problems

Written by  on March 31, 2021

Got a new 64 GiB USB3.1 stick (Samsung) and that’s where the problems started..
It was formatted with exFAT, one partition, which was not mountable for an embedded Linux.
So I tried to to use Windows standard tools (neither via explorer nor via powershell) to create a FAT32-partition of smaller than 32 GiB size. Did not work.

Second thought: let’s do this inside the Kubuntu-VM!
* media was not shown -> fixable by installing the extension pack (else just USB 1.1), then adding in the VM-settings a USB3.0-filter for the respective device, then fire up the VM and activate it in the “virtualbox-bar > devices”.
* check with ‘lsblk’ if there is a new block based device
* format with ‘gparted’ if necessary: one primary partition of 20 GiB FAT32 and the rest ext4 worked like a charm for me (of course, windows can’t handle ext4 ..). Gparted is really a lifesaver, been using this for a decade now.
* mount with ‘sudo mount /dev/sbd1 ~/Desktop/usbsticky’ if OS does not support some auto-mount on plugging-in