External Hard Drives on Other Devices

  • This is kind of a general Linux question, but the device involved is running LibreElec so I figured I’d start here. I’m setting up a Jellyfin server on a Raspberry PI and I’ve successfully mounted my dedicated network drives. The only piece left is a WD My Book USB 3.0 external hard drive. It’s plugged into a Chromebox which is running LibreElec. On a Mac or PC The Chromebox shows up as an SMB shared device and the My Book drive is just a folder. Within Kodi itself I was able to add it with ZeroConference and it displays as 192:168.0.122:445/My Book

    The IP address makes sense, since that’s the address for the device, but I wasn’t sure how the 445 came into play. How does that need to be formatted if you’re trying to mount it using the sudo mount -t cifs command?

  • SMB is a file service, which works on top of a block-based file system. So in theory the underlying file system doesn't matter. However, I recently switched from exFAT to Ext4 on my NAS, since I had trouble to access files after a while. I guess Ext4 is easier to scan for errors under Linux, and such scans are triggered periodically. I suggest Ext4 for Linux.

    SMB default port numbers are 139 or 445, so that's OK.

  • So when I mounted a dedicated network drive share from a WD MyCloud, after creating the mounting spot with sudo mkdir /media/public the command I entered was

    sudo mount -t cifs -o rw,guest,vers=3.0 //deviceipaddress/Public /media/public


    Would the command formats be the same only substitute the Public for My Book and the IP address as written with the :445 port on the end of the IP address?

  • The IP address makes sense, since that’s the address for the device, but I wasn’t sure how the 445 came into play. How does that need to be formatted if you’re trying to mount it using the sudo mount -t cifs command?

    You only need to specify port details when a non-standard port for the protocol is used. LE shares SMB/CIFS on default ports so nothing is needed.

  • Oh, one thing I was curious about is if there can be spaces when you’re mounting a drive. Should the share be entered as “My Book” or would it be “My_Book” ?

  • Spaces are legal but will need to be correctly quoted everywhere else things break. If you want an easier life, avoid naming devices and shares with spaces.

  • Come on, from what I've seen in your posts, you're not the out-of-the-box guy. ^^

    WD passport/book drives come with spaces in their volume names. Some might be even formatted in the way that older Windows do not recognize their partitions.