What external drive formats are supported?

[Mark Fishman]

I understand from the website why you've chosen to use FAT32 for the internal HD. It's pretty much supported everywhere. But the Raspberry Pi runs Linux, and you imply that you could have used ext4 if you hadn't thought FAT32 offered some advantages.

Since I use Linux on my other computers, FAT32 is not a big deal -- but if I want to use my backup disk for other things, I could use ext4 on it -- if the B2 supports reading or writing ext4 over the USB connection.

Apparently the B2 doesn't support NTFS, according to other posts. Does it support anything besides FAT32 for external devices?

Thanks -- Mark F.

[Paul Marwick]

After a bit of experimentation, it seems that the B2 does support some Linux file systems, though the support may be limited. I tried an external USB drive formatted to XFS - fdisk could see the drive, but mounting just resulted in "no such device" errors. I also tried a external USB drive formatted to EXT4 and got the same error (though that may have been due to the USB 3 caddy it is housed in).

I also have a 16 GB flash drive formatted EXT2. I was able to mount that without any errors and use it. However, I did have to mount it manually from an SSH session.

When I get some spare time, I'll have a look at the rules currently used to mount usb3 and try some more options - I'd much rather use EXT$ or XFC formatted disks for backup if possible - FAT32 isn't exactly a robust file system....