External NTFS drive no longer mounts automatically at boot

1st Official Post

    Hello,

    I read pretty much all of the topics on this subject on the forum but I still can't find an answer. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 runnnig the latest version of Libreelec (9.2.6), with add-ons from Thoradia, with Qbittorrent, Deluge, Sonnar and Radarr. It's connected directly to a TV and the LAN network of the house, but it has no outside connections. I had a PI3 before, backedup the content and imported on a fresh RPI 4 build.

    For the life of me I can't understand why the NTFS drive is no longer mounting. It's a NTFS drive becasue I want to connect to it from a Windows machine through LAN and that makes it easier. It worked for more than a year. The drive is in an external Orico 6139U3 PRO rack, which has its own power. When the PI boots up, it wakes up the drive, but I can see after boot that it's not mounted. I have to turn it off, and KODI shows a prompt that the drive has been safely removed, although I could see it wasn't mounted. After I turn the drive ON, the drive mounts just fine. For some reason, Libreelec doesn't mount it automatically after reboot or shutdown.

    Anyone has any ideas? Tried to use fstab but found that's not possible. The drive is not RO, so that's not it. Here are all the logs. Thank you.

    blkid

    mount

    dmesg
    pastekodi

    • Official Post

    A RPi3 still uses SMBv1 by default (depending on which LE version it runs), the RPi4 with 9.2.6 will default to SMBv2. With identical setups things should still work, but perhaps you missed something enabling/disabling SMB versions. The mount looks clean, so it's probably something in the network connection.

    In general, when an NTFS drive is not mounted by a Linux system, there can be a hint of drive errors. The drive will not be mounted for its own safety. So connected the HDD to a Windows machine and test the drive. Do no update your Windows pc to the very latest 20H2 updates, or CHDSK might corrupt your setup... (google it.)

    @Klojum That's the next step. I read that it might be a problem with the drive. I will have to check that as well. Thank you. But what I don't understand why you're talking about samba. It's mounted via USB, it's not a network drive.

    • Official Post
    Code
    [ 41.084656] usb 1-1.2: USB disconnect, device number 3
[ 41.085934] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronizing SCSI cache
[ 41.286978] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=0x07 driverbyte=0x00

    ^ I see this which triggers the "removal" notice that you see, but 10 seconds later the drive remounts and "mount" shows it as mounted read-write which indicates the filesystem is okay (else it would mount read-only or fail).

    The only odd thing that I can see is this from blkid:

    Code
    PTTYPE="atari"

    but I'm not sure that's the reason..

    I eventual found the the problem. It was a problem with the drive as it was failing. Didn't have any bads, but some alerts via SMART. Replaced the drive, it worked fine. I eventually dropped the USB driver for a NAS.

    Thank you for all the help.