[PLUG] Filesystem problems with new USB drive

[John Jason Jordan]

Xubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 computers, up to date. Same issues on both.

I recently bought two 256GB USB drives from an eBay seller in China.
They arrove yesterday, and I quickly discovered that they had two
partitions, a small one of about 10GB and another with the rest of the
drive. The literature with it says 'Micro Vault contains a system
management area.' This sounded fishy to me, so I used Gnome Disk
Utility to delete both partitions and 'erase' the disks. This took
overnight, and this morning they appeared fine. 

With my new clean disks on each disk I created one partition for the
entire disk, labeled them 256GB-1 and 256GB-2, and set about
formatting them ext4. They look OK in the GUIs (Gnome Disk Utility and
GParted), but won't mount:

	Error mounting /dev/sdd1 at /media/jjj/256GB-1: Command-line
	`mount -t "ext4" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid" "/dev/sdd1"
	"/media/jjj/256GB-1"' exited with non-zero exit status 32:
	mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdd1,
	missing codepage or helper program, or other error

So I tried:

	sudo e2fsck -p /dev/sdd1 #-p = 'preen,' i.e. fix all errors
	256GB-1: Superblock has an invalid journal (inode 8). CLEARED.
	*** ext3 journal has been deleted - filesystem is now ext2 only
	*** 256GB-1: Superblock has_journal flag is clear, but a
		journal is present. CLEARED.
	256GB-1: Journal inode is not in use, but contains data.
		CLEARED. 256GB-1: Recreate journal.
	Creating journal (32768 blocks):  Done.
	*** journal has been re-created - filesystem is now ext3 again
	*** 256GB-1: 11/15360000 files (0.0% non-contiguous),
		1011899/61439744 blocks

I don't completely understand what e2fsck did above, but it looks like
it fixed things. However, attempts to mount it result in the same error
message as above. 

Suggestions?