How to Make a Backwards-Compatible ext4 USB Thumb Drive

Recently I tried making a USB thumb drive on a new Ubuntu machine using mkfs.ext4. When I tried mounting the drive on an older Linux system, it failed to mount:

[287190.34045] JBD2: Unrecognised features on journal
[287190.34056] EXT4-fs (sdd1): error loading journal

It turns out that ext4 allows features to be added, in this case a journal.

To make a drive that works with older Linux systems, use this command (replacing X with the right drive letter, be careful!):

sudo mkfs.ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/sdX1

Last modified on 29 Nov 2018 by AO