Geht B3 work with new 6TB

[BubbaJones56]

Hi folks,
I have a B3 working for some years as backup-raid working perfectly with my Mac.
Because I'm just setting up my system anew and the two 2TB in the B3 where nearly filled up, I decided to upgrade to 6TB with two WD-Red.
But I can't get my B3 work again. Put the unpacked image 2.4.1.1 on a 1GB USB and start the B3. It starts up the disk and everything seems to run perfect. Looks like hard-disk is formatted, HD-light inside blinking ...
But after 20 Minutes the whole thing stops. Light on B3 changes from green to blinking rose and that's it.
Started several times new but always same result.

Anyone has an Idea what I can do!?

Tried to make a startup USB with one of the newer buildings from the forum here, but I was not able to copy it to the USB. It's not possible to copy the image to the Stick in Finder, always get the message file to big for the medium to copy to ... Even when file is 8GB and USB is 64GB!

Any help is much appreciated Thanks in advance!

Johannes

[Gordon]

That not being able to write the USB image is a bit of a tricky one. The thing here is: the 8GB images are complete file systems of their own. You must write them to the device itself, not put them on the existing (FAT) file system on the device because this won't work (and FAT is limited to 4GB file size).

You may find the info on THIS page useful.

[BubbaJones56]

Thanks for your help Gordon

I managed to set up a USB but I don't know if the image is really on it because I can't look at it with my Mac - it doesn't show up in finder. And the stick doesn't boot with the b3

Do you have any idea why the USB-Stick with the «2.4.1.1 install» starts (green light) to format the disk and then allways stops after 20 Min. and after this b3 goes on pink blinking light???
For me it would be perfectly enough to have the last 2.6.x system on my b3, because I only use it as backup-raid for my data from Mac ...

Thanks again

Johannes

[Gordon]

Can't really answer that. The tools on the Excito install image are rather old, so there may be an issue with the disk size. It is possible to break into the installer though, because it does enable ssh - login with root:excito as user:password. You may see something odd, like a different disk size.

Regarding the USB stick. After writing the image to the device you should be able to see it. All the Sakaki built images and those based on them, which includes my Bubbagen releases, contain a vfat (DOS/Windows) partition for booting the kernel and an ext4 partition that contains the Live system. Both are accessible from a Mac I think. If you can't see them then something must have gone wrong writing the image. You should probably also note that the boot environment on the B3 is pretty old and I don't think it will be able to boot from a USB stick that is bigger than 16GB. The safe bet is not to go beyond 8GB size and from personal experience I say the cheaper the better.

[martpunktin]

Hi, i'm new here
and to the linux world

The last couple days I was trying to set up MouettE's debian jessie 1.0 image on a B3 with an 6TB WD red.
Setting up the USB-Stick, installing the image, boot process and accessing via SSH was working well.
Then I realised that the installer skript creates two partitions. One of 10GB and one of 512MB.
So I changed the install.ini to create a swap partition with 1GiB and set the main partition to "full"
which means the rest of the disk. As of the log-file partitioning and installation process worked well.
Booting the system instead failed.
I did some tests with decreasing the main partition in steps of 512TiB and found that 3584TiB seems to be
the largest size to get a working system.

Unfortunately I'm not aware of what the next steps could be to make it work, but maybe you could make some of it. If it is helpful i could try to boot a Live-Linux and mount the disk via sata/usb to provide some system-logs of the jessie installation. if "ARM" thats even possible...

Best Martin

[MouettE]

If it is helpful i could try to boot a Live-Linux and mount the disk via sata/usb to provide some system-logs of the jessie installation.

Jessie image installation logs are stored on the USB key (/install/install.log).

I did some tests with decreasing the main partition in steps of 512TiB and found that 3584TiB seems to be
the largest size to get a working system.

Sounds like a U-Boot issue but unfortunately I don't have a 6Tb drive to test it on my dev b3.

[Gordon]

Be advised that having the swap partition at the very end of the disk is not the best idea ever. This part of the disk has the slowest data transfer speeds.

Sakaki solved this issue by creating a tiny boot partition and a kernel with a built-in command line that makes the third partition on the disk the "main" partition (root as we like to call it). The second partition on the disk can then be used for swap. This works well for all disk sizes to get optimum performance when swap is needed.

Given the size of the disks used here having the swap partition a few GiB further away from the start of the disk will likely not make a very huge difference and you should therefore be okay with a larger first partition with a regular kernel that will also use the first partition as root. The size of the root partition will depend on your needs, but normally 20 GiB should be more than sufficient. Make swap the second partition and create a third partition for storing user data. This would normally be /home but you could also mount it at something like /media/part3 and link or bind /home and other data folders (such as /var/lib/mysql) to separate folders. This will prevent those other data folders to show up in the home share but still be able to store large amounts of data that could otherwise cause your system to stall and not be able to boot any more.

[BubbaJones56]

Hi Folks,

I will part from my excito b3
I can't manage to get this work with my new 6TB harddisks ...
I need a reliable and stable solution for my backups cause it’s sort of a life-insurance ... And the b3 is to dated for my needs. So I went on to something up to date.
Will give my b3 to someone who likes to experiment and is more familiar with Linux etc.

So thanks again for all the help here – and if someone is interested in having my b3, just let me know!

Best Johannes