Ultimate Edition Forum

I have a laptop set up to dual-boot Ultimate Edition 3.6 lite and Win7 and I have a USB hard drive formatted ext4 that I'm using for backups with CloneZilla. The first backup checked out fine but the second backup failed. I want to delete the one that failed but I'm not root so it won't let me. Should I just reformat the USB drive as NTFS and try again? I'd rather not lose the one good backup even though it's already outdated.

A FAT filesystem is almost(99.9%) compatible with every OS...by that i mean you have read-write access.
NTFS is windows only.

gnome-disks by default will format to FAT...it will explicitly tell you it is compatible with all filesystems(in case you want to access some data from the backed up drive on a windows session).

By doing disk checks and making sure viruses do not enter the drive, rest assured, your data will last a really long time using FAT.

Note: Absolutely no guarantees on data loss/disk-crashes etc. As long as your disk does not crash; deleted data and corrupted data can easily be sucked out off your disk.

Well, being that the USB drive is 4GB I went ahead and made it NTFS. CloneZilla has no problem writing to it. After I finally got a good backup I ran a surface scan on it and found 2 bad sectors.

On a flash disk, its not possible to isolate "bad sectors". It works only for mechanical hdd.

Nonetheless try using dd:

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sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX

..where X is your flash disk. It will fill up with zeros. It will erode any previous data stored(irrecoverable).
Next use gnome-disks or gparted to create a partition, after that format it.

Again as far bad sectors go on a flash disk, nothing you can do about. Flash memory fails without warning.

No it's a physical hard disk with spinning platters and everything. It came from an older laptop, which I had upgraded after a crashed hard drive (I blame gravity).

S3KshuN8 wrote:No it's a physical hard disk with spinning platters and everything. It came from an older laptop, which I had upgraded after a crashed hard drive (I blame gravity).

As long as the drive dont have any bad sectors, it'll work just fine. No worries

I'll check it again to see if it picks up any new ones, sometimes it takes a few passes to get them all...

I do have another question. The primary reason for installing Ultimate Edition is to get QB64 running in linux. It requires some SDL libraries and the g++ compiler. I found and downloaded g++ but it requires a C++ compiler, which is not present in the Ultimate Edition 3.6 lite currently installed. Should I just wait until I have 3.8 installed before I even bother with this part?

Ultimate Edition 3.8 is much sturdier than 3.6. Its a stable OS.

Yes, please do wait and get 3.8 running and then run qb64.

Does 3.8 have a C compiler for g++ to use?