I have a brand new OSMC installation.
I am trying to “plug in” an external USB drive.
The USB drive was ext4 formatted and I loaded up some media files on a different Pi.
The disk is USB 2 mounted on a powered USB hub. The hub is visible from the pi, because my USB keyboard on the same hub works. The light on the external drive flashes.
When i open up SSH the disk is not visible when I type fdisk -l
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1 2048 499711 497664 243M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2 501760 30375935 29874176 14.3G 83 Linux
Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong please?
My original idea was to set up a file server on this USB drive, and copy files in from my Windows laptop through a samba share. The file server would not be the same Pi as OSMC.
However all three pi that I bought (OSMC, SAMBA Share for media, Volumio) and associated software are so unreliable that I have decided it would be better to use a windows compatible file system on the USB hard drive, so I can at least check the drive on a reliable working windows 10 system. Is NTFS a good choice? if not, what is?
and before someone says read the wiki, when i go to the wiki page and type usb in the search field it finds exactly 0 occurrences.
well posting the logs might help us to see more
dmesg | paste-log and share the URL.
But my guess is the drive doesn’t get enough power.
Why would OSMC be unreliable? if you have a good power supply on the Pi and best a selfpowered Harddrive OSMC is rock solid.
ExFat would be better but similar bad decision as NTFS.
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Probably because normally it ‘just works’ - no instructions needed. In the forum you will find lots of questions and nearly all the solutions are about power supplies.
To eliminate the hub as source of the problem, please try attaching the USB drive directly to one of the Pi’s USB ports. The USB drive does come with an external power adaptor, I hope, else this could be the problem.
As fzinken and grahamh already mentioned, there’s no need for the console voodoo of early RasPi days anymore. Attach a USB device to the Pi, and OSMC should auto-mount it, displaying a hint at the bottom right corner saying something like “Attached removable storage device”.
I repartitioned the entire USB drive on my windows laptop, using NTFS, and installed some test movie, music and foto. Drive works perfectly.
I then re-attached the USB drive using a different powered USB hub, and indeed OSMC automagically mounted the drive and I was able to play music and a movie, so thank you for the tip.
fwiw, the “failing” powered USB hub works perfectly when I attach a keyboard and external DVD reader on the OSMC system.
My next project will be to rebuild my file server which went from working perfectly to blue screen of doom with a single reboot, and put the USB drive back on the file server.
So if anybody can point me to the up to date information of mounting a samba client on OSMC (read only access to the file server) I would be very grateful.
But thank you again for the tip.