Lupu and Puppy 4.3.1 3TB/USB 3.0 mount/size report issues

[otropogo]

When Seagate FA Goflex Desk is attached to a USB 2.0 port under Puppy 4.3.1 Pmount gives red popup with the text, "unable to mount sdx1".

It shows the drive as being 746.56MB in size.

Lupu has so far given no problems mounting the drive on the USB 2.0 port, although in it pmount variously shows the drive as "300TB", and as:

" ntfs 357.7G [with] 2794.1G free"!!

[8-bit]

That one is easy to answer,
Puppy 4.3.1 goes not contain the driver for the "Free Agent" drive.
There was also another drive that required a driver for it to be recognized.

In Lupu, the code that checks the size of the drive/partition was not made to allow for really large hard drive sizes. The big question here though is to if Gparted would see the full drive size.
Loosing capacity/space on the 3T drive due to software not being able to handle partitioning of it correctly would not be a good thing.

[MU]

the kernel of 4.31 is too old.
I use Fluppy 013 to be able to use a 3 terabyte drive from Western Digital.
I have only USB-2 ports, and cannot use a USB 3 PCI-Expresscard, because the slot is covered by the passive cooler of my graficscard.

But I had the same issue with Puppy 4.31, because of the old kernel, Fluppy then solved it.

Mark

[otropogo]

the kernel of 4.31 is too old.
I use Fluppy 013 to be able to use a 3 terabyte drive from Western Digital.
I have only USB-2 ports, and cannot use a USB 3 PCI-Expresscard, because the slot is covered by the passive cooler of my graficscard.

But I had the same issue with Puppy 4.31, because of the old kernel, Fluppy then solved it.

Mark

Thanks Mark.

Here's what Gparted reports:

/dev/sdc -Parted

partition: /dev/sdc1 Filesystem: ntfs Label: FreeAgent Goflex Drive size: 2/73 TiB used: 3.00 GiB unused: 2.73 TiB

partition: unallocated File System: unallocated size 10.09 MiB

Loosing capacity/space on the 3T drive due to software not being able to handle partitioning of it correctly would not be a good thing.

NB:the FreeAgent icon in lupu reports a size of "2794.5 GB", and I commonly encounter huge size reporting errors in Pmount (for instance, a flash memory card in a USB reader whose size is reported at many times the actual size) that appear to be inconsequential in practice.

So it's not clear at this point that part of the 3TB drive will be lost to lupu.

The unreliability of lupu's USB3.0 driver is much more troubling. At this point, rebooting into Windows when I need to do a backup is much more effective than trying to use the USB 3.0 port under lupu.

What bothers me most about this issue right now is that a moderator has locked my original post referring to the problems in lupu 5.2.8





forcing me to limit my report to this thread about Puppy 4.3.1 which no one using lupu is likely to look at.

What is the sense or purpose of that?

even more disturbingly, when I try to post the url of my original, now locked, thread about lupu, it becomes impossible to post the message anywhere, even in a private message to John Murga!!

In order to repost it here, I had to remove the link to the closed topic.

[MU]

yes, it was not correct to close the thread, as it seems to be a different issue.
However, we now hijacked this thread, so lets continue here.

So different to Puppy 4.31, Lupus Kernel supports the large size, if I understand well.

There is just an issue with pmount? Or with the USB 3 driver?

You might try muppyquickmount:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=32107

I use it in Fluppy with the USB 2 ports, and it reports correct sizes.

So a comparison with pmount might be interesting, wait... hmm.. also pmount shows correct values, they just slightly differ from Muppyquickmount.

I'm actually not following the development, so cannot help further, sorry.

Mark

[otropogo]

...

There is just an issue with pmount? Or with the USB 3 driver?

...
Mark

With pmount there's a reporting issue, but not just with external hard drives, also with flash cards mounted in card readers on USB2. I don't have any indication that this reporting issue affects performance.

The USB3.0 issue, OTHO, is serious. The driver doesn't appear to support hotplugging at all, and even when the USB3.0 devices are attached at startup, recognition and mounting is unpredictable, at least with external hard drives.

OK. I was able to change the thread title. Hopefully that will alert others interested in using 3TB USB3 drives under lupu to its existence...

[MU]

The USB3.0 issue, OTHO, is serious. The driver doesn't appear to support hotplugging at all, and even when the USB3.0 devices are attached at startup, recognition and mounting is unpredictable, at least with external hard drives.

Hm, hotplugging works for me in Fluppy013 with USB2. I remove a drive, attach it again, and can see it. It however sometimes gets a different devicename, e.g. /dev/sdd1 instead of /dev/sdc1 before.

This also happens at startup sometimes. I then have to reset the computer, so that the drives get the devicenames that my bootloader menu uses.

So this is not USB3 specific, but a general issue how Linux handles USB drives?

Mark

[Karl Godt]

Hm, hotplugging works for me in Fluppy013 with USB2. I remove a drive, attach it again, and can see it. It however sometimes gets a different devicename, e.g. /dev/sdd1 instead of /dev/sdc1 before.

You might blame udevd for this . Unfortunately it seems not to have a --create-only option [ until now ] . udevd creates and deletes the ^ unneeded ^ device nodes in /dev and if the reinserting happens too quickly or whatever may cause the /dev/sdc to be felt in use or still deleted , udevd assigns the next ^ available ^ node to the USB . Tricky also if you unplug an USB , poweroff and attach a second internal HD : the /dev/sdb may not be available at next boot .

[otropogo]

The USB3.0 issue, OTHO, is serious. The driver doesn't appear to support hotplugging at all, and even when the USB3.0 devices are attached at startup, recognition and mounting is unpredictable, at least with external hard drives.

Hm, hotplugging works for me in Fluppy013 with USB2. I remove a drive, attach it again, and can see it. It however sometimes gets a different devicename, e.g. /dev/sdd1 instead of /dev/sdc1 before.

This also happens at startup sometimes. I then have to reset the computer, so that the drives get the devicenames that my bootloader menu uses.

So this is not USB3 specific, but a general issue how Linux handles USB drives?

Mark

No the hotplugging failure is only with the USB3.0 port in lupu in my experience. On the USB 2.0 port I haven't ever noticed this problem.

[otropogo]

Have now succeeded several times in mounting the 3TB Free Agent Goflex Desk USB3.0 drive under lupu 5.2.8, but ONLY on the USB 2 port. In fact, it can be hot plugged on the USB 2 port.

OTOH, every attempt to mount it on a USB 3.0 expresscard adapapter using lupu USB3.0 driver fails. A desktop icon appears for the drive (if it's attached and powered up at bootup), which gives the correct size when the cursor is passed over it, while Pmount shows it as 300TB/357GB. But all attempts to mount it produce a red popup "unable to mount sdx1".

Meanwhile, a smaller Freeagent Goflex 500GB drive mounts on the USB 3.0 port without problems, so long as it is present when lupu boots up. Hotplugging doesn't work on USB 3.0 ports, although it's fine on USB2.

I conclude the problem is in the USB3.0 driver. No such problems arise in Win 7. Both drives mount and can be hot plugged on either USB 2 or USB 3

[otropogo]

After resizing the 2.9TB ntfs partition to 1.9TB, it mounts and writes normally without error messages in Slacko 5.29.6, lupuk3.07 on either USB2 or USB3, and even in Puppy 4.3.1 (on the USB2 port).

Lupu 5.2.8 continues to mount the partition read only, and Wary gives a red popup warning, but allows writes to be made.