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Toodarday
Asked: 2020-05-19 12:57:19 +0800 CST

ext4 - Laptop can't detect sandisk USB

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I have recently installed Ubuntu 20.04 onto a USB and noticed I am unable to see it on the "Boot from USB" options. I believe this is due to installing it with the ext4 filesystem. My laptop Aspire 3 a315 doesn't seem to support it.

Question 2: What is expected to be the most common filesystem in 5 years?

So my second question is regarding future proofing. What is expected to be the format that will be most commonly usable for laptops in the next 5 years. Is NTFS a good option? I am not asking in regards to performance I just need it to be usable and what is the most likely format that laptops will still be using.

filesystem live-usb ext4

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There are a couple potential issues you're running into. I am confident that the filesystem you chose to install to has nothing to do with it not appearing in your UEFI though.

    1) Your ESP (the partition your EFI boot entry is installed to) is not present on the USB stick itself (EFI partitions can be placed on any device on the system that supports boot, from USB to SD to SSD/HDD, and more.). If this is the case, you'll need to attempt to reinstall your boot loader/config and make the proper partition adjustments.

    2) Your ESP was not properly created (this can mean partition type OR failed bootloader install), and thus your system's UEFI is unable to find the entry to boot.

    3) You booted the live image in legacy mode and installed to the USB with these settings, and the hardware is unaware of the OS installed there, or either legacy or UEFI modes are not being displayed under the USB boot options.

    -- To clarify on my point about filesystems, it is not the machine's job to support the filesystem, but rather that of the operating system's. Ext4 is the general standard for Linux, but even BTRFS, XFS, and more would be functional options. The hardware is pretty much unaware of these concepts in particular. The only filesystem that matters is the one your boot partition (for EFI), which would need to fall into a few particular standards, being FAT32 ("EFI System Partition" as it's called by the Ubuntu installer) or NTFS (though this is usually only relevant for Windows.)

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