Hard Drive Dock Not Accessible
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@Clyde No joy with the Pi4, sadly. Tried using LibreElec, but same issue persists. Gah.
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Did you try the dock with other computers and/or operating systems?
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@Clyde Yes, Win10 machine seems to work with all drives connected...
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No, i meant other machines than your Win 10 machine and the Pis, preferably a very different one (e.g. a PC with Win 7 or Linux, a Mac etc.)
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@Clyde No, I’m afraid that’s all I have.
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Ultimately, the best workaround for this was to switch from RetroPie to OpenElec which seems to read external hard drives differently. I think, the Kodi version for RetroPie assigns very specific paths to each external disk, whereas OpenElec focuses more on each drive’s name and can presumably reassign media paths on the fly.
The upshot of using OpenElec in this instance is that one drive can be removed from the dock and the media paths remain unaffected. In my experience, RetroPie appears to require all media to stay in exactly the same path as it was from the start, which often leads to repeated re-scraping.
Even though I’m grateful to now have Kodi working for my needs, I do really miss being able to exit into RetroPie. I’ve been considering a dual-boot, but would far prefer keeping RetroPie as the front-end.
My best hope is to request an update for how the RetroPie Kodi port connects to external media. Is this possible? Which version of Kodi does RetroPie use?
I’d be so grateful if this added functionality could be considered.
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@pen2paper said in Hard Drive Dock Not Accessible:
Which version of Kodi does RetroPie use?
RetroPie uses the upstream Kodi 18.7 version, without any additional patches or special configuration.
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@mitu Thanks for the quick reply! Does that mean the media-path-issue I’m struggling with is due to how RetroPie links to files? If there’s any chance a fix could be looked into, I’d certainly request it, but what are the chances it could happen, at all?
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@pen2paper From the looks of it, the issue is not Kodi, but rather the discs not being recognized/brought on-line by Linux. If the discs work plugged in directly, but not through the dock, then the issue is with the dock's operation, not RetroPie/Kodi.
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@mitu Again, the drives do work fine through OpenElec, and the file path issue isn’t present there either..?
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@pen2paper You could look for differences in the behaviour of RetroPie and OpenElec. Here're some console commands for a start (everything behind
#is just a comment).Enter these two after you did connect and switch on the dock:
mount # This shows the mounted file systems to see if the drive(s) got mounted, and where.dmesg # shows the system messages. Look what happened to the drive(s) there.Enter the following command before you connect the dock, and let it run while you connect and switch on the dock. There should be messages coming up while the system regognizes the drive(s). Stop the command with
Ctrl+cafterwards.tail -f /var/log/syslog -
@pen2paper said in Hard Drive Dock Not Accessible:
Again, the drives do work fine through OpenElec,
OpenELEC uses its own Linux distribution (JeOS), unlike RetroPie, which uses Raspbian, a Debian derivative. Find out why the drives don't work in a standard Raspbian system and you'll find out why they don't work with RetroPie/Kodi on RetroPie.
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@mitu I’d be happy to keep looking into this further (though I’m no expert, I’m afraid) — the most intriguing aspect for me so far, isn’t that the dock doesn’t seem to work at all through RetroPie, but rather that OpenElec doesn’t seem to be as strict as regard drive paths. My instinct, is that is where the issue lies. Would it be helpful to share the logs as suggested above by Clyde? If so, I’ll try as soon as I can. Anything else I could try in the meantime?
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@pen2paper said in Hard Drive Dock Not Accessible:
Would it be helpful to share the logs as suggested above by Clyde?
Yes, to diagnose the issue, the system logs are the first place to look.
You might want to add some other details about your hardware and setup - what docs are we talking about (vendor/model), what discs are you using, are you fully up-to-date with RetroPie/Rasbian ? -
@mitu Bizarrely, as I was running Clyde’s last recommended command (before turning on the drives, whilst running RetroPie), all three drives on the dock began to work. Then, on attempting to exit Kodi back to Emulation Station, everything froze, forcing me to remote reset through Terminal. When I did, all drive paths were ‘scrambled’ again, and no media was available (“This file is no longer available. Would you like to remove it from the library?”).
I think, the reason the file paths have changed is that one of the three HDDs in the dock has disappeared again in File Manager. The drives are healthy and all work fine with OpenElec and Win10. So close, but so frustrating!
I did see a few “Failed to start usbmount@dev-sdc1.service” notifications among others, and even with the drives recognised, I can foresee encountering similar issues in the future as regard the drive paths being so strict, so would still be keen to raise the issue as a potential bug. That particular functionality on OpenElec would be great to bring over somehow, but I cannot tell you how grateful I am to have had RetroPie back even for a few moments. Thank you so much for your help.
In terms of security, would it be possible to DM the logs, as I can see IP addresses, etc?
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@pen2paper said in Hard Drive Dock Not Accessible:
In terms of security, would it be possible to DM the logs, as I can see IP addresses, etc?
There's no DM in the forums. Use pastebin.com and remove the extraneous info. You can run
dmesg -cto clear the system log, then add the discs/reproduce the error, then the nextdmesgwill show only the logs with the disc operations. -
@mitu Thanks, I shall try my best. Interestingly, from what I can see, the way Kodi’s video sources list external drives via RetroPie is to assign them numbers (root filesystem/media/ usb, usb0, usb1, etc) whereas OpenElec just goes by the drive name.
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Also, does “tail -f /var/log/syslog” only work on RetroPie terminals? Just tried it using OpenElec, and got a “No such file or directory” notification.
The hardware is an Orico 4-bay 2.5/3.5 dock. Linux friendly per the instructions.
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@pen2paper said in Hard Drive Dock Not Accessible:
Also, does “tail -f /var/log/syslog” only work on RetroPie terminals? Just tried it using OpenElec, and got a “No such file or directory” notification.
It should work at least on all Debian based Linux distributions like RetroPie, Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), and Ubuntu. Other distributions might be configured differently without a
/var/log/syslog. I did a quick web search for "openelec syslog", but didn't find anything useful about it.Besides, did you know that OpenELEC seems to be deprecated since 2016, when a dispute among its developers led to the fork LibreELEC? While OpenELECs last release was in 2017, LibreELEC is actively developed with its latest release being from this November. Just in case you didn't know that.
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@clyde Apologies! I am using the latest LibreElec. Will try to post logs today
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