Partition software for huge exfat flash drive

Question: I have a 2 terabyte flash drive I would like to partition. I thought this would be simple no brainer. It uses the exfat file system. But I guess you need special software to do that. You guys know of any?

AFAIK most partitioning tools handle exFAT.

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Hi @deroberts1,

fdisk would be a good option, in my opinion:

Also have a look at:

And:

Or a parted one:

https://wiki.networksecuritytoolkit.org/nstwiki/index.php?title=HowTo_Create_A_GPT_Disk_With_EFI_System_And_exFAT_Partitions_Using_Parted

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Ok. I added exfatprogs to my system and now Gparted can format the flash drive to exfat, which it did successfully. I tried copying a small partition from a USB drive successfully.

But now I want to at least split the drive into two partitions, maybe 3.

You can do that with gparted:

https://gparted.org/

Or with KDE Partition Manager:

For GUI tools, or if you want to stick to CLI, then you can continue with fdisk or parted. You’ll have to do some reading, because I don’t know how to off the top of my head.

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All righty. I have 4 partitions on the 1.91 flash drive.
Thanks for your help!!

Do you really mean flash drive, like a thumb drive, or a portable SSD (solid-state drive)? Because if it is really a flash drive you probably got scammed.

There are lots of scams out there. But it really i s 1.91 terabyte drive. It uses a USB C adapter for the housing. And a PC style USB connector for the laptop.

Yes, it is slower than an SSD. But I only intend to use the drive for backing up, notably my 140 Gib of photos. Once the photos are on the drive, I will put it away.

As graphical programs you can gparted or gnome-disk-utility

It is an external/portable SSD then? I never heard of flash drive of 2TB (as in a USB stick, but yeah I looked for it, Amazon got some). If you bought a 2TB USB stick, you may need to verify it with proper tools to check if it is real, because even on Amazon there was (still?) fake flash cards that would tell the system they are specific amount of GB when it was just fake (resulting for some in just plain write errors when it reaches the real physical limit of the storage, but some more advanced fakes had special firmware that would not error out but just overwrite data over and over letting you think it actually properly works, in any case your data should never go onto this kind of scam hardware).

Not to scare you but better be safe than sorry, so maybe take the time to check it.

//EDIT: a tool called F3 should be able to help for that.

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USB flash drives are not reliable for long-term storage. Just letting you know you shouldn’t rely on this stick as your only backup for irreplaceable photos, videos, and memories.

As in it uses a cable to make the connection? If so, that doesn’t sound like a typical flash drive. Sounds like an external SSD.

True. But it was advertised as a flash drive.

Update. I returned the device. It does not copy reliably. Specifically, when I reviewed the 147 gb of images, some of them did not show the thumbnails. Then, when I tried to copy them again, the error message said it could not overwrite a .part file. Not good. Bye bye!

Amazon made it EXTREMELY easy to return. I took the device to the UPS store along with the QR code Amazon sent me to my smartphone. Done. Zero cost for that.

Please consider using a more reliable storage media (with redundancy and/or multiple backups) for irreplaceable and sentimental data. :pray:

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:scream:

Indeed that doesn’t smell too good. It sounds exactly as the fake storage devices I was talking about, some will not error and continue to fake writing files, the files will be visible, have their ‘size’ but there is no data when you try to read the file.

If you never removed/unplugged it without the proper method (unmount from file manager or the tray icon made for that), then you can indeed blame this drive to have issues. If however you remove the drive without doing that, it is possible you removed it before the cache was properly flushed (and files properly all written).

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