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Setting up your external USB HDD with your Solo the easy way!

Right I've made some progress since this morning, and learned some Unix!
I followed the instructions in this thread to the letter and it failed badly, no idea why it should be different. Here's what I have done to get the drive working...

The USB drive was being listed as /dev/sda1, if you type DF you will see all the filesystems and the huge one is your drive.

Create a new dir to mount it to, under /mnt.

mkdir /mnt/extdrive (mnt already exists, extdrive is the name I gave it, could have been anything.) Then mount the drive to the dir...
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/extdrive

The next thing to do is to add this to your fstab file, this will automount the drive after every restart for you...

Edit fstab (it is in /etc), and just add this line into the bottom of it...

/dev/sda1 /mnt/extdrive auto defaults 0 0

The rest is as per sicilians thread...

Menu / Setup / System / Harddisk Initialization

Then to Recording Paths...

default location is /mnt/extdrive

And the timeshift locn is the same.

Recording and timeshift now work a treat. Hope this helps someone with similar issues.
 
Last edited:
My Duo arrived! I know this is a Solo forum, but this is the thread I found when I was searching for a solution, so maybe it's the best place to ask.

All is going pretty well so far. It has openPLI on it and that is working ok.
I struck one snag though.

When I was struggling with a different Linux PVR, I formatted a 1TB WD drive in an external USB box to use, and it worked OK.
I can't mount that disc with my Mac, and I'd hoped that the Duo would just mount it with no problems.
Not so.

I don't want to reinitialise the disc if I can avoid it at all as there are some files I'd like to get off it first, if only I could mount it!
I've connected to the Duo via telnet, and this is what happened. The Duo itself has no internal disc drive. I'm confident that the sda device shown is the 1TB WD drive I want to mount.
Code:
root@vuduo / # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000202043392 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121600 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1      121600   976751968+  83  Linux
root@vuduo / # ls /mnt
card/     cf/       hdd@      mmc1/     net/      ram/      realroot/ sda1/     union/    usb/
root@vuduo / # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
mount: mounting /dev/sda1 on /mnt/sda1 failed: Invalid argument
root@vuduo / #

Any ideas where am I going wrong?

I don't know for sure what the filesystem on the disc is, but the 83 suggests it IS a Linux one. As I recall, when I formatted it I went for a journalled system. I'm not sure it that means it may be ext2 or JFS or something else.

I'm a Linux newbie too.
 
If you only have one external or usb drive connected /dev/sda1 will be it. (A second would be named sdb1).

The only thing I can suggest here is it may not like sda1 as your mount directory, it may be a reserved identifier.

Try creating a new directory with a unique name and mounting it to that.
 
I've found an easy way to navigate between the USB external drive and a Pendrive that I use in the USB slot at the front (for mkv files etc).

Navigation between the two can be a pain, so using a unix client, navigate to the hard drive directory where your movies are kept (btw you should make this the default opening directory using Menu / Media Player / Menu / Edit Settings / Start Directory first) and create a link to the front usb drive...

ln -s /mnt/sdb1 . Pendrive

Pendrive now shows as a folder alongside my movie files and I can navigate directly between the two.
 
@stash36:
Code:
root@vuduo ~ # mkdir /mnt/WD1T
root@vuduo ~ # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/WD1T
mount: mounting /dev/sda1 on /mnt/WD1T failed: Invalid argument
root@vuduo ~ #
No go.

... navigate to the hard drive directory where your movies are kept
That's a problem.
Looking at it one way, the movies are on the disc I can't mount, so I can't navigate to it.
Looking at it another way, they are on an SMB volume on my LAN, a situation I want to move away from.
 
Sorry xarqi my second reply was unrelated to your issue.

Can't see why you are getting invalid argument, the command is valid so something else is wrong. You might have to bite the bullet and try the initialise disk command under the menu. I'm not 100% sure that this will wipe your data off it, but obviously there is a risk that it will.
If you don't want to try that then maybe you need to ask in the duo forum, it is much busier in there, pretty quiet here unfortunately.
 
OK - thanks for taking a swing at it. I'll repost over in the Duo section, and maybe join a Linux forum somewhere..
 
hi all!
please help

stuck on step 4,got massage "unable to initiate hardisc
error:mount failed"
i m using mains powered 500gb Seagate Expansion.

wot i am doin wrong?
 
Hi Sicilian,

Have just got my samsung external drive For VU+DUO

Got stuck on the first step:
1. Connect to a windows PC. Go to control panel > Administrive Tools > Copumter Management > Storage > Disk Managment > Select you USB HDD, right click on it and select 'Delete Volume'. Make sure that its your USB HDD that your deleting!

I Selected USB HDD, right clicked on it but did not find 'Delete Volume'. instead I found " Delete Partition".

Help please to be able to proceed.
 
Ok, try connecting to your Solo now. Make sure the Solo is powered off before connecting. The try to initialize.

Retried as poer your instructions. Received Message:

Unable to initialize harddisk. Error : Mount failed.

By the way my device is Vu+Duo and not Solo. Image in use is vu+duo origonal v 5.3 the latest.
 
Hi,

!/ I think I did manage to initialize the hard disk.

Following result obtained after I sent "df -h" command


OpenEmbedded Linux bm750


Vuplus 2.0.1 bm750

bm750 login: root
root@bm750:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 118.0M 36.6M 81.4M 31% /
udev 2.0M 56.0K 1.9M 3% /dev
/dev/sdb1 465.6G 198.0M 465.4G 0% /media/sdb1
/dev/mtdblock2 4.0M 388.0K 3.6M 9% /boot
tmpfs 69.1M 248.0K 68.9M 0% /var
tmpfs 69.1M 4.0K 69.1M 0% /tmp
tmpfs 69.1M 0 69.1M 0% /dev/shm
root@bm750:~#

2/ Made a directory "mkdir /media/usb/movie".


3. Press Menu > Setup > System > Can not find the feature " Recording paths ".

Am sorry. Feel am being a pain in the -----. Appreciate your patience.

Regards
 
Managed to finalize everything.

Thanks Sicilian for the tutorial
 
A quick question! Why shouldn't we use drive's that don't have their own power supply? I have a 500gb WD Passport drive sitting idle and was thinking I might use it with my Vu+ Duo!
 
Unable to initialize harddisk.Error:Creating partition failed.This is the message I keep getting when I try to initialize my harddisk,anybody got any ideas
 
Even with the error message hard drive was mounted,everything working as it should
 

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