
Now your partition has been created, you need to mount it somewhere to use it. This can take a bit of time, but it should give you an update on what’s being written. It’ll now go off and start writing the filesystem.

Write the changes to disk (this can’t be undone). Just hit return for each to accept the defaults. It’ll now ask you to set the start and end cylinders on the disk. If you already have a filesystem on the disk, wipe it. Only needed if it’s been mounted already. If you’re following this, make sure you’re using the correct drive name. HFS or the Hierarchical File System was introduced by Apple in 1985 for use in Mac OS. Neither Windows or Mac OS has a native ext2 ext3 or ext4 support. ext4 has a maximum file size of 16 terabytes and the maximum volume size of 1 exabyte. But I end up spending 20 minutes searching every time I need to remind myself how to do it, so I’m putting it here to save me that hassle.įor the code, I’m just going to assume the drive is /dev/sdb. In 2008 the ext4 was introduced which is the most modern dedicated Linux file system. FWIW, Fedora, which uses a separate /boot partition by default, has been using ext4fs on its /boot for a while now.There are plenty of guides for how to do this online. These are rather specialized reasons to favor these filesystems, though. In this environment, FAT is better because it's the EFI's native filesystem, and ReiserFS has a speed advantage over ext2fs or ext4fs because of quirks of the add-on EFI drivers for these filesystems. I've begun using FAT or ReiserFS more recently, but only because I'm using EFI and am loading my kernels off of these partitions. Personally, I've been using ext2fs on most of my systems' /boot partitions until recently. I'm not sure about reliability, but I'd expect that any reliability problems with ext4fs would be pretty well eliminated by now.

Ext4fs might be a tiny bit faster, especially if you've got an EFI-based system and are using the EFI filesystem drivers, but this effect will usually be so small that it qualifies as negligible. ext4fs specifically, ext4fs won't have many advantages its journal and other advanced features will be of little importance on such a small partition.


I've seen some configurations that rely on such things, and they wouldn't work with FAT.Īs to ext2fs vs. For instance, since FAT doesn't support symbolic links, you can't do something like link a kernel with a generic name to one with a more specific name. Some of these filesystems do have limitations, though. You can use anything you like for a separate /boot partition, provided both Linux and your boot loader can read it - ext2, ext4, XFS, HFS+, FAT, etc.
