I was pretty excited when I received my Raspberry Pi last week as a replacement for my aging Tonidoplug V1 since due to its lack of support to the newest OS distributions (other than ArchLinux, which I am not too familiar with).
I am using 3.6.11+ Linux, which at the time of writing is the latest Raspbian (Raspberry Pi + Debian) “wheezy” image that is available online.
cat /proc/version Linux version 3.6.11+ (dc4@dc4-arm-01) (gcc version 4.7.2 20120731 (prerelease) (crosstool-NG linaro-1.13.1+bzr2458 - Linaro GCC 2012.08) ) #456 PREEMPT Mon May 20 17:42:15 BST 2013
You can always download the latest version of the Raspbian image here.
For storage, I used an old Drobo with four WD Red 3TB drives. Thanks to thin provision in Drobo, I was able to create two 8TB partitions to store my data. As my Drobo has crashed recently, I had to format it with the Drobo tools program to create the partitions.
Raspberry Pi was able to detect partitions using fdisk, however with a warning message:
Disk /dev/sda: 8796.1 GB, 8796093022208 bytes 256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1065220 cylinders, total 17179869184 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 4294967295 2147483647+ ee GPT WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted. Disk /dev/sdb: 8796.1 GB, 8796093022208 bytes 256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1065220 cylinders, total 17179869184 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 4294967295 2147483647+ ee GPT
When I simply tried to use mount, it does not quite work:
mount /dev/sdb /media/Data/ NTFS signature is missing. Failed to mount '/dev/sdb': Invalid argument The device '/dev/sdb' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?
Trying to mount sdb1 gave the same results:
mount /dev/sdb1 /media/Data NTFS signature is missing. Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?
Just when I was about to give up, I remembered the warning message, how about I just try to use GNU Parted? Turns out if I use parted -l rather than fdisk -l, I see a much better picture:
parted -l Model: TRUSTED Mass Storage (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 8796GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 17.4kB 134MB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftr es 2 134MB 8796GB 8796GB ntfs Basic data partition Model: TRUSTED Mass Storage (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 8796GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 17.4kB 134MB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftr es 2 134MB 8796GB 8796GB ntfs Basic data partition
As you can see, when Windows formatted the partition, the first partition was marked as Microsoft reserved partition with a weird partition type of msftr and the actual data partition is on the second partition.
Therefore, if I do:
mount /dev/sdb2 /media/Data/
Now I can finally mount everything properly. And df -h is now showing both of my 8TB partitions:
df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on rootfs 30G 2.2G 27G 8% / /dev/root 30G 2.2G 27G 8% / devtmpfs 212M 0 212M 0% /dev tmpfs 44M 856K 43M 2% /run tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock tmpfs 88M 0 88M 0% /run/shm /dev/mmcblk0p1 56M 19M 38M 33% /boot /dev/sdb2 8.0T 891G 7.2T 11% /media/Data /dev/sda2 8.0T 1.7T 6.4T 21% /media/Backup
In summary, when you are mounting a gpt partition, please use parted –l to check the actual data partition (the one with the huge disk size) and mount that specific partition number to the mount point.