Failed to mount USB HD

[Erpmans]

Hello,

I have a B3 with a very small harddrive installed, but I have attached a large 3 TB WD MyBook Live to its USB-port containing a lot of Data. Unfortunately the B3 doesn't seem to be able to mount this drive. It is recognised by the B3, but when I try to mount it under tab 'Disk' using the button 'Connect' in the partition information it displays: "failed to mount /dev/sdb2 on /home/storage/extern/My_Book_1140-1". The MyBook is NTFS formatted and has previously been attached to a Iomega NAS (Home Media Network Hard Drive Cloud Edition), which worked fine.

I also have a 1 TB Seagate drive in a custom external case which I also attached to the USB, and it works fine. I can mount this drive by using the said button 'Connect'. This drive is als NTFS-formatted.

Does anyone know why I can't mount the USB WD MyBook? Is it the way it is formatted in NTFS? For instance, is it important what clustersize is used while formatting the drive?

I would be very pleased if anyone would happen to have a solution for this mounting problem.

Erpmans

[Ubi]

If yourb3 is older than a few months you may need to apply a patch to make it read 3tb disks. Please seatch the forum on this topic, as this has been explained a few times. If that doesnt help let us know.

[Erpmans]

I have done some further research. I entered the command dmesg and there were some lines that could indicate the problem:
NTFS-fs error (device sdb2): parse_ntfs_boot_sector(): Volume size (2TiB) is too large for this architecture. Maximum supported is 2 TiB. Sorry.
NTFS-fs error (device sdb2): ntfs_fill_super(): Unsupported NTFS filesystem.

Does this mean that no NTFS-partitions larger than 2 TB on USB drives are supported? If that's so, I can come up with two solutions:
1. splitting the disk in two NTFS-partitions smaller than 2 TB
2. formatting the drive with another filesystem, eg EXT2 or EXT3

Does anyone know if either or both solution will do the trick? Before I start this procedure I would like to be sure if this would be the cure, as it will be quite a hassle with all the data that is already stored on the drive.

Regards,
Erpmans

[Erpmans]

If yourb3 is older than a few months you may need to apply a patch to make it read 3tb disks. Please seatch the forum on this topic, as this has been explained a few times. If that doesnt help let us know.

Dear Ubi,

I will check the forum for that. But I very recently bought this B3 and I have also installed the latest firmware.

Erpmans

[Erpmans]

After some browsing through the forum and some google searches, I seem to have found the solution. I installed ntfs-3g:

SSH-login
Gain root access:

Code: Select all

su

Password: excito

Code: Select all

apt-get update

Code: Select all

apt-get install ntfs-3g

After reattaching the 3 TB drive, and pushing the 'Connect' button in the Disk-tab of web-interface, the drive instantly mounted and was accessible. I read some comments on the internet that this solution may influence the speed of access to the drive. I have not had the time yet to check whether this is this the case.

Hope this will help others with the same problem.

Cheers,
Erpmans