Booting TonidoPlug with an external USB disk

stopthinking80 · **Joined:** Mon Oct 12, 2009 3:02 am **Posts:** 24

i just cannot get this to work reliably. this is getting really frustrating.

can boot from usb-thumb SOMETIMES, from 500GB external Trekstor drive NEVER

Alterlife · **Joined:** Mon Oct 05, 2009 10:59 am **Posts:** 5

A little help:

I ran

Code:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1

to format the usb drive, but following this I am unable to mount the partition due to the following error:

Code:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

dmsg | tail produces the following :

Code:

JBD: no valid journal superblock found
EXT3-fs: error loading journal.

so I run fsck, and sure enough:

Code:

fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
e2fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
Superblock has an invalid ext3 journal (inode 8).

But I am not sure why this is happening? it's a freshly formatted drive...

fsck removes the journal and fixes the filesystem so that it can be mounted as ext2...

What am I doing wrong :-/

Tuxedo · **Joined:** Wed Jan 28, 2009 11:30 pm **Posts:** 1361

Are you running the command 'mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1' from the plug. If not can you please run the format command from the plug.

BTW, make sure you don't have the partition /dev/sda1 not mounted anywhere and then do the formatting.

Alterlife · **Joined:** Mon Oct 05, 2009 10:59 am **Posts:** 5

I do not have /dev/sda1 mounted anywhere, and I am running the format command from the plug...

The interesting thing is that the drive gets mounted Ok after it gets converted to ext2, but if I try to convert it back to ext3, I run into the same problem...

For now, I'm hoping that it's a problem with my flash drive... I'll post back with an update once I find my other flash drive.

LARRYS · **Posted:** Fri Nov 20, 2009 10:11 pm

where can I find these files to download
"5. Download the root and modules tar ball from TonidoPlug site and place in the newly created ext3 partition."
Does anyone have the link? :?:

Tuxedo · **Joined:** Wed Jan 28, 2009 11:30 pm **Posts:** 1361

You can find the steps and link in the first post for this thread.
http://tonido.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=312&start=0

krispy · **Posted:** Thu Nov 26, 2009 10:26 pm

This worked great for me, until I made a slight mod. My external drive has lots of space, so I dropped sda1 down to 100G and added a swap partition and a fat32 partition. When I started up the plug, the usb0 changed its mount to the sda3, (fat32), partition and my data is 'lost', as far as the tonido software is concerned. Is this avoidable/fixable, or does my external drive have to be one partition only?

Tuxedo · **Joined:** Wed Jan 28, 2009 11:30 pm **Posts:** 1361

Your data should be there. You can SSH to the plug and unmount sda3 and mount sda1 on /media/usb0

Code:

# umount /dev/sda3
# mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb0

Also plug should mount the partitions in the order it was discovered. This cannot be controlled unless you stop the automounter and do it manually.

krispy · **Posted:** Fri Nov 27, 2009 9:04 am

Thanks. I guess it is better to leave as a single partition. (I did the umount and changed usb0, but then the entire system directories became visable. Probably a bad idea.) I will rebuild again, leaving as one partition.

Materdaddy · **Joined:** Fri Dec 04, 2009 4:45 pm **Posts:** 13

This seems to only work for me on a cold boot (actually removing power). The directions say to simply run "reboot", however software methods always result in a boot from flash. Even if I boot via USB (cold boot) and then reboot, it will boot back to flash again. I am a linux user and rarely reboot, however I absolutely cannot use a method that requires cold boot, because to me that is completely unreliable. What if the CPU overheats, or my power glitches for a second while I'm away from my home. I have no way to reboot the machine back to using the external USB disk.

Is this a known bug in uBoot?
Is it something that can be fixed in software?
Are there MTD partitions where a new uBoot can be flashed if this bug can be fixed?

Booting TonidoPlug with an external USB disk

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