User Manual

You can use the ext4 file system on USB drives connected to your Keenetic router.

You must first install the Ext filesystem component for your Keenetic router to work with the ext4 file system. You can do this from the General System Settings page under KeeneticOS Update and Component Options by clicking on Component options.

Ext4 is one of the major file systems, used primarily in operating systems with a Linux kernel. For more information, visit: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

Compared to ext3, ext4 supports larger file sizes and is a faster, more efficient and more stable file system.

We recommend formatting a drive in the ext4 file system from a GNU/Linux distribution by the operating system or using special programs and utilities for disk management.

Formatting in Linux

Usually, a GNU/Linux OS distribution has a graphical utility for formatting USB drives and hard drives (e.g. in Linux Mint — USB Stick Formatter utility, in Ubuntu — Gnome Disk Utility, etc.) as well as the GParted drive management utility. You can use these tools to format a drive or format it from the command line.

Here is an example of formatting a USB flash drive using the USB Stick Formatter utility.

A universal way to format a USB drive is to use the GParted drive management utility. Usually, it is already installed in an OS, but if necessary, it can be installed from the official repositories (run sudo apt install gparted or sudo yum install gparted depending on the distribution).

Launch GParted. Select the required device in the upper right corner (you can identify your drive by label, size or file system). Unmount the drive so that you can format it.

You can also format with special commands via Terminal.

One of the ways is as follows:

Execute the df command and define the location of the connected drive (/dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, ...). In our example, the flash drive is in /dev/sdc1.

Then, it should be unmounted. You can do it using a command

sudo umount /dev/sdc1

Now, to format it into an ext4 file system labelled 'USB', execute the command

sudo mkfs.ext4 -n 'USB' -I /dev/sdc1

sudo mkfs.ext4 -O^metadata_csum -b 4096 -m0 -L MYLABEL /dev/sdc3

sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/<xxx></code>

Formatting in Windows

As described above, formatting the drive in the ext4 file system is recommended from the GNU/Linux distribution. However, you can format it from Windows if needed. For example, you can use Paragon Partition Manager Free or AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition.

Formatting in Paragon Partition Manager Free:

Connect the prepared drive with the ext4 file system to the router's USB port. The drive should appear on the Applications page under USB Devices.