Will ext2 cause trouble on USB flash drive?

[tilman victor]

In post http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=113809
Beardedragon says:
"Most USB flash drives will not take anything other than FAT 16 or 32. (...)"

OOPS (?)
The first thing I usually do with a new USB flash drive is converting it to ext2, because
i) I need my rwx-bits and
ii) I've decided to break up with that one-day-we-will-charge-you company completely - sorry
iii) no: not "sorry"

Everything has worked fine so far---despite some quantum effects see other post---but now I'm worrying a bit.
Seriously: Are my files in danger?

[xenopeek]

I don't think so. any file system should work on USB flash drives. When you are using a file system that on Linux has full rwx support, you need to keep that in th back of your mind. If you get an error you're not allowed to do something, check the file mode bits and check who is the owner and what is the group. You wouldn't be the first who had somehow transfered ownership of a directory to the root user with the file mode bits set to only allow the owner to do anything. Then suddenly as an average user you're not allowed to do anything

[Ongytenes]

I have used ext2 successfully on USB flash drives. There is one thing you might want to consider. You can create a very small FAT partition as the first partition. This way, if someone stuck your flash drive into a Windows machine, they won't be prompted to format the drive by Windows, which would be disastrous to your data. All they will be able to see is the small partition. I have done this by creating a 40MB FAT16 partition. This also comes in handy if you need to carry over a file to a Windows machine.

[falloutgod101]

Well is shouldn't hurt the flash-drive but you will not be able to read it on a windows machine. It will prompt you to format the drive before you can use it. I think its because of the different journaling/Partitioning tables systems used between FAT32 and EXT2. In general if its for booting a linux distro i use EXT4 and for data transfer i use FAT 32 for is portability across Linux/Mac OSX/Windows

[nunol]

You could also use ext4 without the journal.