I have a Raspberry PI to which an external 1T hard drive is attached by USB. The USB drive works fine if it is formatted in FAT but if I format the drive in ext4 the drive does not mount correctly and it gives me all sorts of error. This is what I do:
fdisk -l and the result is
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2 1953525167 976762583 83 Linux then I run
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 and this runs and does what it does without any erros. then I mount the drive by
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/external1 and this takes a little while but it returns with no error. Two things happen here. If I do a ls /mnt/external1 I get the following error:
ls: reading directory /mnt/external1: Input/output error the other thing that happens in that if I do a fdisk -l I will get this now:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 2 1953525167 976762583 83 Linux my disk is now moved to sdb1 and if I try to mount sdb1 the same errors happen and the disk reappear under sda1.
What am I doing wrong?
Here is the output from dmesg
[98931.054218] usb 1-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=13fd, idProduct=1340 [98931.054254] usb 1-1.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [98931.054274] usb 1-1.2: Product: External [98931.054290] usb 1-1.2: Manufacturer: Generic [98931.054308] usb 1-1.2: SerialNumber: 533144464256454C20202020 [98931.055405] usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected [98931.058815] scsi12 : usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0 [98932.054219] scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access Generic External 2.10 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [98932.055913] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1 [98932.056737] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB) [98932.058233] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off [98932.058270] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 21 00 00 00 [98932.059724] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found [98932.059763] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [98932.066927] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found [98932.066967] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [98932.090896] sdb: sdb1 [98932.096586] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found [98932.096629] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [98932.096654] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk [98935.392602] Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 121667584 [98935.392632] lost page write due to I/O error on sda1 [98935.392651] JBD2: Error -5 detected when updating journal superblock for sda1-8. [98935.392822] Aborting journal on device sda1-8. [98935.392857] Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 121667584 [98935.392872] lost page write due to I/O error on sda1 [98935.392887] JBD2: Error -5 detected when updating journal superblock for sda1-8. [98970.278132] EXT4-fs warning (device sda1): __ext4_read_dirblock:908: error reading directory block (ino 2, block 0) [98970.278186] EXT4-fs error (device sda1): __ext4_journal_start_sb:62: Detected aborted journal [98970.300661] EXT4-fs (sda1): Remounting filesystem read-only 4 Answers
To create the partition I used fdisk by invoking sudo fdisk /dev/sda the interactive session is easy to follow :
Command (m for help): d Selected partition 1 Partition 1 has been deleted. Command (m for help): n Partition number (1-128, default 1): First sector (34-1953525134, default 2048): 34 Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (34-1953525134, default 1953525134): Command (m for help): w The partition table has been altered. Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table. Syncing disks. Next, I formatted the partition:
pi@retina:~ $ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 mke2fs 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014) Creating filesystem with 244190637 4k blocks and 61054976 inodes Filesystem UUID: fe042d87-3266-44b5-beff-a98f70b783ed Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 102400000, 214990848 Allocating group tables: done Writing inode tables: done Creating journal (32768 blocks): done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done Created a new partition 1 of type 'Linux filesystem' and of size 931.5 GiB. finally I ejected the drive:
sudo eject /dev/sda to re-connect it, such that it appears now in the mount table.
I also had problems with ext4 and the raspberry pi (3), when trying to format a usb stick with
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 (after creating a gpt table and a linux partition with fdisk)
This was my error message:
Warning, had trouble writing out superblocks.
FAT however worked.
So I tried to format the usb stick with gparted on another pc and when it worked I checked for the command gparted was using and tried to format the usb sick with this command on my raspberry pi. It still took some time (about a minute) but it worked.
sudo mkfs.ext4 -F -O ^64bit -L "YOUR_LABEL" /dev/sda1 Use tune2fs command to adjust some parameters:
tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sda1tune2fs -L bakap01 /dev/sda1
The -m option is for adjusting the percentage of reserved blocks. The reserved blocks are used by privileged processes which is by default 5% of the hard disk size. (I assume) Since you are using the external hard disk solely as a storage, I set this to 0 so I can also use those 5% for storage. The -L option is for labeling the file system.
You can also use parted for this purpose. I formatted two external disks with parted as ext4 and they work well.
Before you plug the device run ls -t /dev | grep sd and run it again after you plug and note the device letter (I'll use sdX). Unmount the drive if it is automatically mounted (it will have a partition number when mounted):
sudo umount /dev/sdX1 Run parted without the partition number an as root:
sudo parted /dev/sdX mklabel gpt mkpart primary mkpart primary ext 0% 100% quit And format it (with partition number):
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1 Now plug and unplug the device, if does not mount automatically, mount it as root. Note that, since Rpi is a low power consuming device, USB port does not feed an external HDD which does not have separate power supply.
