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Majusbeh · 2013-07-10, 15:15

Hey guys,

I recently got my raspberry pi and just now tried to hook my ext. hdd to it for the first time. At first everything works fine, the hdd shows up, I can browse it, use it as a source and watch movies without a problem, but only for a couple of minutes. After that the ext. hdd just unmounts, with and a message in raspbmc shows up, that the ext. hdd was unsafely removed.
I have no idea what causes this problem, because the ext. hdd is working fine on my pc.

Some information about my setup that might help:
I'm using raspbmc on a usb thumb drive connected directly to the raspberries usb port, the other port is connected to a usb hub (which has its own power cord). The ext. hdd, which also has its own power cord is connected to the usb hub and is formatted with ntfs.

Normally I have to either restart raspbmc after the ext. hdd unmounts or reconnect it, but while writing this I tried to play an HD movie from the ext. hdd and it unmounted after only a few seconds into the movie, the movie then stopped and the ext. hdd remounted automatically. (before now I only tried sd movies). I also tried this a second time with the same results.

I hope someone knows more about this then I do and I'd be happy to post more information if needed, thanks.

mayoman · 2013-07-10, 15:52

Smells a lot like a power supply problem, though the fact that the HDD is not powered through the pi means you should be ok. What is the spec of the supply powering the pi itself?

**sraue** · 2013-07-10, 16:22

also does it works in OpenELEC? can you check?

Majusbeh · (This post was last modified: 2013-07-10, 19:29 by Majusbeh.)

It sounds like a power supply problem right?
I've got a 1A power supply on the raspberry pi.

I havent tried it with OpenElec, I had openelec running before raspbmc but I ran into some problems with corrupting sd images (hence the switch to usb+raspbmc).

I have another SD card lying around, but its only a 1GB card. I dont know if thats enough space, I'm gonna look it up and try it.

EDIT: Okay I installed OpenElec on my second SD, but its the same as with raspbmc, a few seconds (the higher the quality, or bitrate or just in general the streaming size of the movie the shorter is this time) after I start the movie the ext. hdd unmounts and then remounts after about half a minute.

EDIT2: I tried to play a 18GB big mkv file from the ext. hdd and it immediately unmounted my ext. hdd, without even starting the movie, playing a 600MB movie on the other hand worked for almost 3 minutes before the ext. hdd unmounted itself.

mayoman · 2013-07-10, 19:31

1A should be OK, though note some power supplies cannot supply their rated load for any length of time. Also you can get a voltage drop along the cable If the wire is very thin. If you have a multimeter to hand I would check supply voltages under load, also check for a voltage drop across fuse F3. If you are at 4.75V or less, then you would see symptoms very like the one you are describing.

Maybe also worth trying to stream something from the thumb drive through the USB hub (using the openelec SD card of course!), and again directly through the pi USB port to rule out an issue with the hub itself.

Majusbeh · (This post was last modified: 2013-07-10, 22:16 by Majusbeh.)

Okay, thanks!. I sadly don't have a multimeter, but I'm going to try out streaming something without the usb hub with the openelec sd card.

Edit: Well this is strange. I think it my ext. hdd has some kind of failure. First of all, everything works fine now, with or without usb hub and with or without openelec. Before I tested your advice (using openelec without usb hub) I made a fat32 partition on the ext. hdd (while keeping the ntfs) and then tested the whole thing again and strangely it works now. The ntfs partition as well as the fat32 partition both work very well with raspbmc.

I just hope that it works without further problems now, but if I get an error somewhere I suppose its because of my harddrive and not because of the raspberry pi.

Thanks for the help guys

jlm70 · 2014-06-07, 21:11

I'm connecting with this thread, 'cos I'm suffering the same continuous USB unmounting.
My RPI have been setup as a NAS / torrent server (transmission + samba).
I'm running raspbian, power comes at 2.1A (10W iPad compliant adapter).
The USB HDD is an external 3TB disk, NTFS formatted, GPT ok (installed ntfs-3g), with its EXTERNAL power supply.

When I reboot the PI, all is ok for some minutes, then... boom. If I try going to my /mnt/folder and do a "ls" I get input/output error.

Top gives never more than 60% of cpu load... so... I really don't know what's happening :-(
Any idea? Many TIA!

chaoticdude · 2014-06-27, 04:47

I've got the same issue, I'm using this device:

M8 Amlogic S802 Quad Core Android 4.4 Smart TV Box XBMC Media Player 4K Miracast

XBMC works fine, I can add my external HDD and configure the libraries for tv/video, but it seems as if after an hour or two the drive disconnects, and reconnects with a different source (sda as compared to sba) and I have to rebuild my entire library. It's happened at least five times.

I'm using a WD Elements 1TB USB 3.0 HDD, soon to be adding a second.

Any thoughts as to why it's disconnecting the drive?

dandnsmith · 2014-06-27, 10:36

I'd suggest a look at whether the drive is power-saving, and that is why the disconnect.
As to remedies, why are you using things like sda and sdb in the source description?
If you label the filesystems (what type are they?), then they will always mount using the filesystem name, and can be uniquely identified by that ( I have labelled NTFS, FAT, exFAT and EXT filesystems to take advantage of this feature)

chaoticdude · 2014-06-27, 16:39

(2014-06-27, 10:36)dandnsmith Wrote: I'd suggest a look at whether the drive is power-saving, and that is why the disconnect.
As to remedies, why are you using things like sda and sdb in the source description?
If you label the filesystems (what type are they?), then they will always mount using the filesystem name, and can be uniquely identified by that ( I have labelled NTFS, FAT, exFAT and EXT filesystems to take advantage of this feature)

sda and sdb are the names given the external hard drive when it mounts--ie, /root/externalstorage/sda/movies/ -- I configure using that filepath and for some reason the drive disconnects and when it reconnects it changes to /root/externalstorage/sdb/movies/

As for power saving, I'll have to figure out how to check that--thanks for the advice.

dandnsmith · 2014-06-29, 12:21

I am well aware of the sda and sdb usage, however I'm not clear on why, with raspbmc, you're not letting the drive automount under /media.
If you allow it to automount, and have the filesystem labelled, then it will mount in the same place and you can use the filepath [i]/media/filesystemlabel[i] with any local modifier (such as movies if that is the folder where they are).

HTH