Hard drive not working with raspberry pi 3

1st Official Post

    Hi,

    My external hard drive is not letting me add files to it, in file manager it shows up as ESD-ISO.

    File system at the moment is NTFS have also tried as ext4.

    Any help to rectify the issue greatly appreciated.

    Mark

    • Official Post

    EXT4 should not be a problem as it is basically Linux' default disk format.

    Have you check for disk errors, as that is one thing that might prevent Linux from writing data to your disk.

    Most likely there was a hybrid-ISO image installed before and the ISO-9660/ECMA-119 Volume Descriptor is still detected.

    To verify this assumption first detect your disk with parted -l, Most likely a /dev/sdX.

    If

    Code
     dd if=/dev/sdX bs=2048 skip=16 count=1|hexdump -C

    is printing .CD001 at the beginning the Volume Descriptor is there.

    Fat Warning: only do the following on an empty disk or with a recent backup!

    Erase the Volume Descriptor with:

    Code
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=2048 seek=16 count=1

    Further to mglae suggestion that a hybrid-ISO may have been on the drive at some point, you might wish to read up on the wipefs command. It can be used to list file system signatures on a drive or partition in addition to selectively erasing left over signatures.