Terabyte USB drive
GavinWraith (26) 1531 posts |
What format should I use for a 1 Terabyte USB Buffalo hard drive so that it can be read both by RISC OS and by Raspbian? At the moment it shows up as SCSIFS with 256 Gb on the RISC OS iconbar, but it does not register at all with Raspbian. Does there exist Raspbian software to read SCSIFS, or RISC OS |
David Feugey (2125) 2687 posts |
FAT32? |
andym (447) 462 posts |
I have managed this using Mini-Tools Partition Wizard on Windows, so I imagine gParted should be able to do the same with Raspbian. It’s a palaver though. As I remember, you have to format a 256gb partition first with gParted and write down the geometry numbers. Then return it to RISC OS and format the disc based on those numbers. THEN go back to gParted and create the partition for Raspbian AFTER that number (it doesn’t understand RISC OS, so just suggests the disc is blank – you have to manually place the partition). You then need to set that partition as a primary boot partition. YMMV and obviously you will wipe everything from your disc! Like I said, it’s a faff! Obviously, this won’t allow you to share files between the two systems. In that case, formatting to FAT32 and using FAT32FS on RISC OS probably is your best bet. |
GavinWraith (26) 1531 posts |
I think FAT32 limits one to 4GB. My RISC OS SD card says it has 58GB. At present I share files using a 2GB memory stick. |
andym (447) 462 posts |
Isn’t that the individual file size? I think that disc/partition size is 2TB. |
Chris Evans (457) 1614 posts |
We tried to FAT32 format a drive on a Windows 10 computer for a customer who also planned to connect it to his RaspberryRO, after about four hours it said 100% complete and then errored:-( It worked fine on Windows NTFS! |
Colin Ferris (399) 1734 posts |
Which prog did you use on Windows to ‘Init’ the Drive? There is a RO Fat32 ‘Init’ prog on the same Site as !FAT32Fs Some info here would be handy – to Partition/Init a USB stick to both Fat32/Linux formats. Linux’s downloads like to use their own format – to install. So having a Fat32 partition at the begining of the Stick would be handy – to transfer files between RO and Windows. Linux should be able to read the Fat32 partition when running. |
Rick Murray (539) 13384 posts |
Yurgle! Was it verifying sectors, writing zeroes, something like that? Modern drives are not supposed to be low-level formatted. That is done once and never again (to leave SMART etc to manage the drive behind the scenes). It would make sense for an initialisation to verify all sectors to ensure the drive is good, but there are quicker ways to do that. Writing zeroes is another option that, frankly, I wouldn’t bother too much with. Thus, a “format” can be as quick as setting up the basic drive structure (normally less than a minute). Recall that “IDE” drives are an abstraction (witness the bogus numbers of heads, tracks, sides reported by the BIOS). There’s not much need to “format” anything, only write the expected data into the expected places and mark the rest of the space as available in the map. Now for the potentially quick way to test the drive. Put it into a PC, go not the BIOS, go into the drive configuration. In there you ought to be able to choose the drive and invoke the diagnostic self-test. The self-test phase that I have seen on SATA drives runs in two phases. The first phase is quick (minutes), the second phase is slow (hours). However if the drive is aware that it has a fault, it will report that very quickly as the internal firmware keeps a track of these sorts of things. So the longer it takes, the more likely your drive is good. Frankly, I’d trust the drive to test itself better than simplistic software. By the way, when you formatted the device with Windows, how did you do it? You can use the DOS prompt, specifying /FS:FAT32 to get around the arbitrary size restriction (but it is slow), there are also a number of GUI programs designed to do the same job, though I have no experience with any. I think the last time I needed to format a largish drive FAT32, I used an Ubuntu LiveCD and just did (with sudo privs) For mkdosfs options, read https://linux.die.net/man/8/mkdosfs |
Tristan M. (2946) 1035 posts |
I know it’s not the answer you want, but my RPi/s with RO access a 2TB NTFS and a 2TB EXT4 drive all the time via NFS. When I got the most recent USB 2TB to replace my failed USB 60GB (it was fine for building source) HDD, I thought for ages about how to arrange the drive. The EXT4 drive works out really well, but fighting with permissions initially for NFS and the FS can be a pain. EXT4 is a great FS that supports large files and almost arbitrarily large partitions without an increase in cluster size. So your 100 byte text file won’t take up 4MB or whatever. I suppose if you wanted to get really fancy you could use an SBC with a USB OTG port and set it up as a network or storage? device gadget. Out of my depth here. It’s mostly if you want to keep it simple anyway. Really my answer is you can’t reasonably use a huge drive with RISC OS unless you want a large cluster size. |
Tristan M. (2946) 1035 posts |
I know it’s not the answer you want, but my RPi/s with RO access a 2TB NTFS and a 2TB EXT4 drive all the time via NFS. When I got the most recent USB 2TB to replace my failed USB 60GB (it was fine for building source) HDD, I thought for ages about how to arrange the drive. The EXT4 drive works out really well, but fighting with permissions initially for NFS and the FS can be a pain. EXT4 is a great FS that supports large files and almost arbitrarily large partitions without an increase in cluster size. So your 100 byte text file won’t take up 4MB or whatever. I suppose if you wanted to get really fancy you could use an SBC with a USB OTG port and set it up as a network or storage? device gadget. Out of my depth here. It’s mostly if you want to keep it simple anyway. Really my answer is you can’t reasonably use a huge drive with RISC OS unless you want a large cluster size. |