Mounting USB drives via UUID in cmdline.txt on rbp1

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1

Hi,

I have a Raspberry Pi 1 with the latest OSMC build (2016.10-1). I have two external USB drives that I’d like to use. I would like the filesystem on the first one, and extra storage on the 2nd one. I use an SD card for booting.

I have already formatted one of the USB drives, and copied over the filesystem. I can use it as my raspberry’s filesystem if I have root=/dev/sda1 in /boot/cmdline.txt However, I cannot use the UUID in gdisk (or PARTUUID from blkid output) in place of /dev/sda1. I also edited /etc/fstab and put the partition UUID info there. After I reboot, the boot process aborts and dumps me to a terminal screen with a rescue shell prompt. I have ensured that I am using a GPT partition table.

I saw some threads on here about that being an issue last November and it was fixed in the next monthly update, but I am not sure that it was ever working for the rbp1 (and anyway it is clearly not working for me). I read something about PARTUID being deprecated and that UUID is the way to go, but that it needs an initrd. There were links to pre-built images, but those links were broken, and my own attempts to build a custom ramdisk image using the latest git script failed.

What can I do to get multiple USB disks working on my RBP1?

Thanks.

2

OSMC use an initrd since November 2015.

Thus, UUID is supported, but PARTUUID is now deprecated

When you get put to the rescue shell prompt, use ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid to verify your UUID is correct.

Also use rootwait in cmdline.txt, or your disk may not spin up in time.

3

Sam,

Using the UUID in /dev/disk/by-uuid/ did the trick. I already had rootwait. Thank you!

My mistake was that I was using gdisk interactively e.g., gdisk /dev/sda

then I pressed i to get the disk info, but it gave me just that - the disk UUID, not the partition UUID. I followed those steps from a thread somewhere…who knows, but now I am good, hurrah! Back to OSMC config.

Thanks for taking the time to reply and thanks for a truly AWESOME distro - I have it on 4-5 Raspberry Pis at home (versions 1, 2 and 3) and one Raspberry at work.

4

Cool – glad it’s all sorted.

Thanks for reporting back. I’m sure this will help some other users.

One day, we’ll use UUID in the installer.

Sam