USB hard disks access

Pi MusicBox
1

A noob question here 'cause i am a bit confussed.

Aren’t hard disks attached localy on the Pi supposed to be scanned during boot?
And aren’t they supposed to be accessed from a smb network? I can only see the music folder from the sd card.
I am on musicbox0.5.2beta.

Thank you in advance.

2

Do you use NTFS drives? MusicBox only supports fat formatted drives

3

I see :cry: . Thank you for your reply @woutervanwijk
After all i love PiMusicbox!

4

Wasn’t there someone who was going to try adding ntfs-3g? Did that happen? You can always try and get it working yourself @NiPi

5

I am willing to try it but i am quite new to linux (noobie) and i don’t know how should i move.
Could you give me a hint on where to start from?

Following a guide like that is a good way to start?

6

That looks like a reasonable place to start.

7

So, i followed your advice and did the next steps i found here, here and here:

In a few words:
I created a directory

mkdir
/music/usb2g

then, changed the owner to root (i don’t know if that was necessary)

chown root:root /music/usb2g

and mounted the disk

mount -t ntfs-3g -o uid=root,gid=root /dev/sda1 /music/usb2g

Then i edited the file system table so that this disk is mounted every time myRaspberry Pi starts up:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

/dev/sda1 /music/usb2g
ntfs-3g uid=root,gid=root
0 0

Then, i edited the samba configuration file in order to access the folder from my network:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

and at the end of the file, i added the following lines

[USB]

    path = /music/usb2g

    comment = Directory for test files

    writable = yes

    browseable = yes

    guest ok = yes

    create mask = 0660

    directory mask = 0771

Then, i saved the edited file

Press Control-X

Press y

Press [enter]

and finally restarted samba to use the new configuration file.

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

Everything seems to work fine now with ntfs hdds
Next step is to redo the whole process by using the UUID of the disk.
Waiting for your comments if any.

Thank you @woutervanwijk for the wonderful PiMusicBox and @kingosticks for the motivation.

1 Like
9

Thank You, NiPi.
Your recipe is very well written and easy to understand.

10

In the future, we’ll want to do this using usbmount as it takes care of all of that automatically. See http://raspmer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/automount-ntfs-filesystem-with-usbmount.html

Also see https://github.com/pimusicbox/pimusicbox/issues/124