USB mount issue

[smoke_15]

Hello, I've been able to successfully mount a USB flash drive of size 32 GiB and created a CIFS drive via gargoyle (1.12).
However, when I try this with larger sizes (2 TiB), USB hard drive or a USB flash drive, it is able to detect it under "Disk to Format". When the format completes, it goes back to saying "No mounted USB disks detected". Is this something that can be done from the command line? Preferably a windows filesystem but not necessary.

Thanks

[smoke_15]

Just a follow up on this, here's what I've tried to get things working manually:

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fdisk /dev/sda - create new partition sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 - format
mkdir -p /tmp/usb_mount/usb
mount -t ext4 /dev/sda1 /tmp/usb_mount/usb
mount -t cifs -o guest //192.168.1.1/guest_1 /tmp/usb_mount/usb

The last mount command fails with:

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mount: mounting //192.168.1.1/guest_1 on /tmp/usb_mount/usb failed: No such device

So some specific questions:
1. Looks like the GUI is able to successfully enable samba mounts (with small USB keys) so the correct packages+kernel modules must be installed by default. What command would I use to do that manually from the shell? Not too concerned at this time about having it auto-enable the mount at boot.

2. 'opkg list | grep -i exfat' returns nothing. I've got a wrt1900acs running 1.12. Is that kernel built with the exfat module but perhaps just not available in the repository? I would absolutely love to be able to copy large media files to the USB via windows laptop and just plug into the router to serve via LAN wifi.

If #2 isn't possible, maybe I'll just bite the bullet and switch to the SFF x86 based 1.14 router and rebuild with exfat support. I just found the wifi on the SFF x86 to be glitchy.

[Lantis]

That looks not right to me... that mounts a cifs share, not creates one?

If you format via Gargoyle it will become ext4. This should work fine, I've never had it not work. I don't have any large external harddrives to try it on at the moment.
When you format a disk via Gargoyle make sure you're not making it an extroot or swap or anything like that...

Alternatively format it using another linux machine to ext4 or a windows machine to ntfs and that should work fine as well.
On plugging in to the router it should detect and become available for creating a share on.

If you really are having trouble getting it to work via the GUI, the correct way to create a CIFS/SMB share is to set the config in /etc/config/samba and then let samba36 do the rest. Without making use of the Gargoyle shareusers package you'll need to fix up your own access permissions.

[smoke_15]

Been digging into this, is a much deeper rabbit hole than I had envisioned

I just want to quickly copy large media files from a vanilla windows laptop to a USB storage, mount to gargoyle and watch over LAN.

What I've learned since last posting is that the gargoyle popup that tells you the drive has completed formatting is inaccurate. I noticed running 'top' in the shell that when you format, something like a 2 TiB drive can take up to 4 mins to do an ext4 format. Need to wait for the format to complete before the GUI gives the option to add a CIFS mount. Once formatted, the CIFS mount works fine (need to enable FTP as well for it to work properly but thats a minor glitch, I don't select NFS).

Next I installed a virtualbox guest ubuntu on the windows with the hope that it should be possible to quickly use the ubuntu guest to quickly copy large files onto the USB. The ext4 USB drive format, mount, unmount is unfortunately broken. Maybe related to the large drive size? Then tried vfat, largest file size is limited to 4 GiB. So that's a no go.

Now trying f2fs - have had the most success so far in that been able to format/copy from the ubuntu guest. Tinkered with /etc/init.d/usb_storage slightly to add support for f2fs mount. Unfortunately the media files don't seem to want to play over samba. So am kinda left scratching my head at the moment.

Overall, I am sure the ext4 works fine if the USB storage just stays on the router entirely and do both read/write over LAN. Think it might've been more convenient though for the layman if exFAT was the default and/or there was kernel support for it at a minimum. Could then read/write the storage from a windows PC or a gargoyle router.

[smoke_15]

Looks like NTFS was the answer per your suggestion

What threw me off was the output of `cat /proc/filesystems' didn't list it as a possibility so didn't even think of it:

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root@Gargoyle:~# cat /proc/filesystems
nodev   sysfs
nodev   rootfs
nodev   tmpfs
nodev   bdev
nodev   proc
nodev   debugfs
nodev   sockfs
nodev   bpf
nodev   pipefs
nodev   ramfs
nodev   devpts
        ext3
        ext2
        ext4
        squashfs
nodev   jffs2
nodev   overlay
        f2fs
nodev   ubifs
        hfsplus
nodev   rpc_pipefs
        vfat
        msdos
nodev   nfs
nodev   nfsd
        fuseblk
nodev   fuse
nodev   fusectl

[Lantis]

Possibly because it’s fuse ntfs-3g. In 1.15 it’s a kernel native ntfs driver