LibreElec installations. USB flash Drive not detected

1st Official Post

    I have Kodi 17.4 on two LibreElec TV boxes. One box is based on an Amlogic 912 cpu and is booted from a microSD card and the other is based on an Amlogic S905X and is booted from the internal memory. Neither box will detect my USB drive when it is plugged in which contains a number of mp4 videos I want to watch.

    I also have Kodi 17.4 installed on my PC and the same USB key is detected and the videos can be played using Kodi's player. I also have another TV box with Android 6 installed and it detects the USB key but cannot read the MP4 files.

    Could some member please enlighten me as to what I need to do to use the boxes to watch the videos.


    Thanks;(

    Thanks Jocke.Sve for your response.

    The US key mentioned is eight GB and is formatted in NTFS. I tried another USB of one GB formatted in the fat format and copied a movie onto it and it worked perfectly.

    Now I am really confused. Am I limited to the fat file system and a maximum of four GB?

    I just bought a sixteen GB micro SD card thinking I could use it in one of the boxes for storage.:rolleyes:

    NTFS should be fine. I use a 5TB usb and multiple smaller (3, 2, 1.5TB and below) NTFS drives with LE. If the drive can't be read on 2 libreelec machines and the content can't be played on an android box that says the problem's with the drive, not the os. Most likely (and I don't know the technicalities, I'm parroting what I've read previously) LE detects a problem with the drive so doesn't mount it. Android mounts it but it doesn't work.

    If it were me I'd format the drive, try again, and if it still doesn't work throw it in the 'probably crap' drawer. Then try a different drive.

    edit: just realised it works in windows, which doesn't fit the 'knackered drive' theory - but the rest holds true. If it was a hard drive rather than a usb stick I'd guess it wasn't removed safely from windows, but I don't think that applies with removeable media.

    Adding to trogggy 's comments, I'd try to do a proper (no quick format) re-format those USB-sticks on Your computer and try again.

    If thet doesn't do any difference I'm agreeing with trogggy regarding value of these sticks...

    Maybe You could borrow one/two spare USB-sticks from someone and try with these?

    I'm using 16/32/64GB USB-sticks across my different LE computers and various RPi installations. All formatted with FAT32 or NTFS and these works without any issues.

    Quote from ianinhobart

    Thanks Jocke.Sve for your response.

    The US key mentioned is eight GB and is formatted in NTFS. I tried another USB of one GB formatted in the fat format and copied a movie onto it and it worked perfectly.

    Now I am really confused. Am I limited to the fat file system and a maximum of four GB?

    I just bought a sixteen GB micro SD card thinking I could use it in one of the boxes for storage.:rolleyes:

    As others have commented - NTFS, FAT32 should all work. For reference, FAT32 can be used for drives up to 2TB, but you can run into other limitations - the maximum size for a single file in FAT32 is 4GB, but that should not stop the stick being seen.

    • Official Post

    The normal issue with NTFS drives not mounting is the filesystem being in an unclean state after users literally pull the drive instead of doing a "safe eject" in Windows. This is detected by Linux and the kernel refuses to mount the filesystem to avoid damage. If you reconnect to Windows and run chkdsk.exe over the drive and then safely eject it will probably mount fine.

    Thanks chewitt for the additional information which I will try with the faulty drive. In the mean time I bought a new 8GB drive to see if it made a difference and as predicted in the above posts the drive was detected and I was able to play the movies I had put on the drive. I do remember being advised a long time ago that when you are looking for a fault, look for the simple things first before the complicated possible causes.:)