Should this work?
I can’t seem to get it mounted. The SATA-USB bridge is recognised:
osmc@osmc4kp:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 2017:1689
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 13fd:1340 Initio Corporation Hi-Speed USB to SATA Bridge
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
But when I do an fdisk, it appears at the end as sda1 doesn’t give all the info:
Also, the disk is a 3TB drive whereas it looks like it’s detected as 2TB?
The drive is recognised and accessible when I plug the USB cable into my laptop, so the hardware / cable side is OK.
Also, it’s a 3.5" HDD with dedicated power supply going to the drive caddy.
Looks like it’s not being recognised as GPT. Did you format it yourself? For comparison, here’s my Seagate, as bought but with a ext4 partition added with gparted:
Disk /dev/sda: 3.64 TiB, 4000787029504 bytes, 7814037167 sectors
Disk model: Backup+ Hub BK
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 04064888-9199-4551-997C-07326499C037
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 34 262177 262144 128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda2 3922778112 7814035455 3891257344 1.8T Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda3 264192 3922778111 3922513920 1.8T Linux filesystem
If I put another standard MBR disk formatted as NTFS in the USB caddy, it’s recognised and automounts. I guess I should have tried that first, but as it works, I guess it rules out a USB-SATA caddy hardware / compatibility problem.
However, I had an old unused 600GB drive which I’ve just wiped, turned into a GPT disk and formatted as NTFS and it mounts without issues!
Disk /dev/sdb: 596.2 GiB, 640135028736 bytes, 1250263728 sectors
Disk model: External
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 0EEAA648-012D-40E8-BC80-50F83085A66C
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdb1 34 32767 32734 16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sdb2 32768 1250260991 1250228224 596.2G Microsoft basic data
Maybe there’s something weird with my 3TB drive that the Vero doesn’t like but it’s fine with Windows?
I can’t understand / see where it gets the ~800GB from
And I just did a scandisk on it in Windows, and it seems OK
Chkdsk was executed in scan mode on a volume snapshot.
Checking file system on D:
Volume label is USB3TB.
Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
488448 file records processed. File verification completed.
Phase duration (File record verification): 13.09 seconds.
1886 large file records processed. Phase duration (Orphan file record recovery): 2.55 milliseconds.
0 bad file records processed. Phase duration (Bad file record checking): 0.85 milliseconds.
Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...
64 reparse records processed. 488764 index entries processed. Index verification completed.
Phase duration (Index verification): 752.43 milliseconds.
Phase duration (Orphan reconnection): 35.16 milliseconds.
Phase duration (Orphan recovery to lost and found): 6.25 milliseconds.
64 reparse records processed. Phase duration (Reparse point and Object ID verification): 5.33 milliseconds.
Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...
Security descriptor verification completed.
Phase duration (Security descriptor verification): 40.70 milliseconds.
158 data files processed. Phase duration (Data attribute verification): 2.39 milliseconds.
Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.
2861458 MB total disk space.
1675033844 KB in 1599 files.
928 KB in 160 indexes.
644411 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
1254454832 KB available on disk.
4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
732533503 total allocation units on disk.
313613708 allocation units available on disk.
Total duration: 13.94 seconds (13947 ms).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...
Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...
I can’t recall if I ever plugged my 4TB disk into a vero before carving out a ext4 partition but I think there are other users with > 2TB USB disks attached to their veros.
That Disklabel type: dos suggests vero is reading the backup MPT boot sector only and not recognising the GPT stuff (reading it instead as a partition and limiting that to 2T as that’s all MPT understands).
Do you have a Linux PC (eg Ubuntu) you could try it on? If not and there’s nothing unique on the disc you could also run gparted from an iso image to have a poke around and, possibly re-format it.
I could possible try a USB bootable Ubuntu on my laptop and see if it recognises it.
Just to confirm, my vero is running Debian 10.7. I guess that is normal / up to date and should work fine?
Unfortunately, I don’t have another >2TB drive handy right now to compare with. I can’t reformat the drive either as I don’t really have enough space on my other drives.
It’s not a massive problem, in a couple of weeks, I’ll be back at my main place where I have my NAS so I’ll be able to copy the files from the 3TB onto it and then access it via NFS. In the meantime, I can share via my laptop.
But I’m curious and it’s bugging me why it’s not working!
I’ll see what I can find out with a bootable Ubuntu and report back
The vero attached to my 4T disk was running Debian 10 until last week with no problems. Now it’s updated to Bullseye. You could try that to see if it’s more tolerant.
As I have several hard drives, I can actually copy all the data from the 3TB drive across to multiple other HDDs and then reformat, etc.
I had an old PC in bits, and plugged the 3TB drive into it so I could then access it over the network. As I didn’t have a Windows OS handy, I stupidly put in my Ubuntu bootable USB key. I say stupid because I tried it before on my laptop and it didn’t work.
However, on the PC where the HDD is plugged directly into a SATA port and not via the USB, it’s instantly recognised!
So I guess there is a hardware limitation with the USB caddy I’ve been using and it doesn’t like GPT disks with partitions over 2TB but only in Linux!
My guess is backing up the data and reformatting cleanly won’t make a difference if it’s a hardware compatibility issue.
I don’t know anything about Initio Corporation but it wouldn’t be the first time something works only on Windoze. Was the caddy advertised as linux-compatible? Still returnable?
