Incorrect drive size on SMB with external HDD

brussel · July 20, 2017 at 9:43 PM

Hi all,

I'm very new to Linux and Pi and I need some help.

I've installed Libreelec and I've got an external USB HDD attached however on my windows machine the drive shows up as significantly smaller (400MB) that the actual drive (500GB). I have seen some suggestions of editing smb.conf but libreelec has a read only file system.

Any solutions?

**Klojum** · July 20, 2017 at 10:12 PM Official Post

Question: did you install LibreELEC onto the external USB HDD?

Because Windows understands nothing of Linux partitions, and only sees the first (FAT) partition on a LibreELEC installation.

brussel · July 20, 2017 at 10:18 PM

Hi Klojum,

No I installed via noobs on a 32GB SD card.

if I open the libreelec pi under Windows network and then navigate to the folder "/media/MediaDrive" which is what I named the HDD and I map it I can write small files to it and create folders but it is only a few hundred MB in size and not the 500GB it should be.

<edit>Are you suggesting I SHOULD install it onto the HDD?

**Klojum** · July 20, 2017 at 10:36 PM Official Post

No, definitely do NOT install LE on any big HDD

Quote from brussel

on my windows machine the drive shows up as significantly smaller (400MB) that the actual drive (500GB)

On the Windows machine itself it shows as only 400 MB?!?... That's truely weird.

What happens if you connect the external HDD directly to the Raspberry Pi? Does it show the whole drive size?

brussel · July 20, 2017 at 10:42 PM

Sorry I realise I've not been quite clear.

If plugged into the windows machine the drive shows 500gb if I plug it into the Pi and then connect to it from the windows machine across the network it shows the drive size incorrectly.

I've seen some suggestions that it might be because libreelec mounts the hdd onto a sub folder of the SD card and the samba server report incorrect free space and drive sizes...

**Klojum** · July 20, 2017 at 11:21 PM Official Post

Hmpf... What format does the drive have: NTFS, ExFAT, something else?

Can you connect the drive to the RPi directly, and SSH into your RPi, and run the following commands?

Code

dmesg | paste
blkid | paste
mount | paste

and paste the return URLs here?

brussel · July 21, 2017 at 7:20 AM

I've tried both exFat and NTFS

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ETBB

**escalade** · July 21, 2017 at 12:48 PM

Copy /etc/samba/smb.conf to /storage/.config/samba.conf and change "allocation roundup size" to 4096. You can also try commenting it out for the default size.

brussel · July 21, 2017 at 7:07 PM

Hi escalade, that seems to have solved the problem. Thanks! Perhaps you can explain how the smb.conf and samba.conf relate to each other?

brussel · July 21, 2017 at 9:45 PM

grrr. OK so it solved it initially. Then I start copying some large files and the problem returns after a while, the size is back down to approx 400mb

**chewitt** · July 22, 2017 at 12:40 AM Official Post

Samba looks for /storage/.config/samba.conf at startup and if found it's used as the active configuration. If not found it falls back to the embedded configuration in /etc/smb.conf

brussel · July 22, 2017 at 4:59 PM

it seems like copying large files still creates a problem...