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Large external HDDs (over 2TB)

X

XRS

New Member
Has anyone managed to get one working? The Humax seems to know it's there but won't access it. I'm trying with a 4TB drive.
 
Yes, I did a while back thanks. It seemed that the current version of the CFW would have the answer but from what I can make out it only seems to apply to internal HDDs larger than 2TB. I did enter into a dialogue with af123 but after I uploaded a couple of screen dumps I heard no more.
 
I've got a 4TB working ok but first set it up as an internal drive then put it into the caddy. Make sure the caddy supports large disks also.
 
Thanks, just trying to break into my Seagate desktop drive. Not built to be dismantled by the looks of it!
 
Well, the case was very difficult to break into but it's done now and the drive is in my backup Humax with the latest CFW. Trouble is, it's been formatting all night, so that's not working now. My son said that when he put the 2TB drive in his Humax it seemed to take seconds.
Anyone have any clues please?
 
XRS said:
Well, the case was very difficult to break into but it's done now and the drive is in my backup Humax with the latest CFW. Trouble is, it's been formatting all night, so that's not working now.
Click to expand...
Perhaps you could confirm what you did after you put the drive in the Humax?
 
Thanks guys, I did of course (wrongly) expect the Humax to do the formatting. I have just completed the exercise of formatting it via telnet so will now reassemble everything and hope it all works!
 
All back together and working, just have to transfer the files from the old drive now. Many thanks again for the support available on this forum.
 
Taking the disk out of its case is a bit of a faff and may invalidate the warranty of the drive. Connecting it to the HDR-FOX main board and using the 'gpft' option from maintenance mode will work, giving you a large partition in EXT3 format, but this will also give you two extra unwanted partitions (1 and 10 GB, respectively).
If you want your external drive in NTFS format with GPT, you should be able to do this on a Windows PC using the Disk Management console. The option to convert to GPT is only available when the disk is unallocated. I have found the easiest way to create a GPT drive is to use Diskpart (command line tool) to assign the disk as GPT and then format with Disk Management. I did this on a PC running Windows 10, the method is as follows:

Connect the drive to the PC by USB, then open a command prompt (admin). Type the following commands:

Diskpart (opens the Diskpart program)
List disk (lists all connected drives with their allocated numbers: the disk for conversion was disk 1)
Select disk 1 (changes the selected disk to disk 1: substitute whichever number corresponds to your drive), you will get a confirmation
List disk (to check that the correct disk is selected)
Clean (wipe disk configuration and convert the drive to unallocated: THE DISK WILL BE WIPED WITHOUT ASKING FOR CONFIRMATION - ensure that you have selected the correct disk first!)
Convert gpt (will mark the disk as GPT)
List disk (to check that gpt is selected)

Open Disk Management:
Right click on the 'unallocated' partition of your drive then select 'New Simple Volume' (if nothing happens, eject the USB drive, then reconnect and try again.
Click 'Next' x3
Give the volume a label, if you like. Make sure 'Perform a quick format' is selected (otherwise formatting will take ages), then 'Next' and 'Finish' (the default format for a large drive is NTFS).

If you wish, return to Diskpart and type 'List disk' (this will confirm that the volume is still GPT)

Exit Diskpart, close command prompt and exit Disk Management.

I don't have a large (>2TB) to test this on but it worked with 1TB USB drive and a 16GB USB flash drive. If you try it on a large drive, please post to let us know how you got on.
 
I recently connected a 4TB external USB drive to the box. It came preformatted with GPT partition table and a single NTFS partition. With CF 3.10 and ntfs-3g installed, it created the mount point as 'gpt-drive1' but did not mount the drive. I could manually mount it with ntfs-3g so it is a problem with the ntfs-3g mount scripts. Since then I have reformatted it to ext3 and it seems fine.

Later..., I may make an update for the ntfs-3g package.
 
whilst we're (almost) on the subject, has there been any thought as to ext4 support, for external drives? That would (should?) solve the problem of the very long fsck times for ext3, if nothing else.
 
xyz321 said:
I recently connected a 4TB external USB drive to the box. It came preformatted with GPT partition table and a single NTFS partition. With CF 3.10 and ntfs-3g installed, it created the mount point as 'gpt-drive1' but did not mount the drive. I could manually mount it with ntfs-3g so it is a problem with the ntfs-3g mount scripts. Since then I have reformatted it to ext3 and it seems fine.

Later..., I may make an update for the ntfs-3g package.
Click to expand...
I had the above issue when I connected a 4tb external drive yesterday. Searching on the forum I found this comment. It would be appreciated if you would update ntfs-3g. package.
Regards
 
xyz321 said:
I recently connected a 4TB external USB drive to the box. It came preformatted with GPT partition table and a single NTFS partition. With CF 3.10 and ntfs-3g installed, it created the mount point as 'gpt-drive1' but did not mount the drive. I could manually mount it with ntfs-3g so it is a problem with the ntfs-3g mount scripts. Since then I have reformatted it to ext3 and it seems fine.

Later..., I may make an update for the ntfs-3g package.
Click to expand...

Would you be able to tell me how you did this please? I'm trying to get a 4TB single partition NTFS drive in external USB mounted for network sharing and as I'm no CLI expert I don't know which commands/syntaxes to use to do this manually.
 
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