I’ve used USB sticks on the Raspberry Pi before, many times. So I plugged one in for some extra storage. It let me write once and then went into r/o mode. What the hell! Pulled it, plugged it into the PC, no problem. Plugged it into a Windows 7 machine, it complained about drive errors and fixed it. Try again, no luck. So I gave up for a while, it was full of Music that I play through the Sockso Music Server, so no big deal, but I really do want to use it for external storage as the SD card will fill up eventually. Plus I would like to use it as more storage for ftp as well and possibly for Sparkleshare which I intend to install.

One more look

It turns out that at some point while fiddling with the USB drive, I formatted it NTFS. I believe that I tried to format it ext4 and then ext2, neither worked. So I used a WIndows machine to make it NTFS, so it would work.

The issue is that the Rasp Pi does not come with NTFS support out of the box. So I needed to  install ntfsprogs to get it to work OK….

sudo apt-get install nfsprogs

Otherwise it immediately goes to read only. I have not tested but I assume nfsprogs also installs tools to check NTFS file-systems.

To mount my USB stick, I Need to execute …

sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw,uid=erick,gid=erick /dev/sda1 /media/sda/

Symlinks for Sockso Music Server

I have a symlink for music in my Music dir (/home/erick/Music. Set it to, main-collection -> /media/sda/Music/ , in this manner it points to the music collection on the usb stick and Sockso happily finds the music. Sockso does not like spaces in filenames!