How to format external drive for use on LibreELEC?

1st Official Post

    Hi there,

    I want to expand LibreELEC's storage by adding an external drive to it. I tried formatting it in ext4 on Ubuntu, then plugging it into LE, but it doesn't seem to be able to write to it. I bet this is a permissions issue.

    On the other hand, I have another external drive formatted as NTFS that does work, read-write.

    What is the proper way to format an external drive for use on LE, or directly using LE itself?

    • Official Post

    EXT4 is the standard disk format for Linux, so Ubuntu formatting your HDD should present no problems. However, the file rights probably need to be adjusted as LibreELEC only has one user (root), and Ubuntu's DISK application will use the logged-in user.

    Try via a terminal to re-assign the user to the external HDD folders/files:

    sudo chown -R root:root /dev/sdX/

    where X is the device letter of your external hdd.

    Double-check what the file rights are. They should be okay by default for local use for LibreELEC.

    It worked.

    Detailed procedure:

    Activate SSH access on LibreELEC

    SSD formatted under Ubuntu is plugged in.

    From Linux / Mac OS X, log in as root with SSH password.

    type mount to see the mount point of the external disk (in my case that was /dev/sda1)

    type:

    Code
    chown -R root:root /dev/sda1

    (no need for sudo as we're already root)