Is a 4TB HDD just too big?
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MBR disks have a limit of 2TB: You would need to format the disk as GPT to make this work.
(This applies to all operating systems: It's a limitation of MBR itself)
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@sliver-x Thank you, I’ll give that a try later 👍🏻
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@silver-x Nope, didn't work.
I'm using a Mac and so, Disk utility.
I opened up the sidebar and showed all devices, so I made sure I clicked the drive itself not just the boot sector.
Selected ExFat and GUID.
Still getting the same error.
Is this something Windows is better at?
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@killrbill Don't own a Mac, so I cannot say anything about the disktools there and AFAIK ExFat should work with 4TB Partitions and beyond (max. 512TB). Does your Media accept a 4TB Partition in whatever nowadays native MAC FS maybe?
I am most of the time on windows os, but for partitioning I am nearly always falling back to gparted, either on my Ubuntu PC, an Ubuntu Live- or the Gparted Live-Media. I wouldn't recommend ExFat for anything, except there is a particular need for that Filesystem and depending on the needs either stick to Ext4 (so to say a/the "native *nix system" and so ideal choice for the raspi) or ntfs. If you have access to a PC that can run such a Live-System (or from within a Virtual Machine) I would give that a try, another possible way would be to do it on the raspi itself with the Diskmanager from the raspberry OS.Edit: Don't know, but it should be possible to run the *nix Live-Medias on x86 based Macs .?.
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@killrbill said in Is a 4TB HDD just too big?:
Fresh install of 4.7.1 RetroPie
By the way, maybe you should elaborate that step a bit more detailed.
AFAIK Etcher and the Rasperry Installer are honouring an exisiting partition table and are just cleansing the drive from existing partitions before writing back the imaged ones, but I am not sure if that is valid for all those Progs out there.Edit: Ok, maybe I got that one wrong and the Partition Table is part of the Images , especially if those Images are containing a bootblock. If that would be the case and you are simply writing such an image to that disk, that may explain the MBR Type (All Raspi Based "Install" Images I know of are made up of a 100k FAT32 Boot Partition and a minimized EXT4 one with the actuall OS on it.
Yup... Best you do some searches for the topic in a general raspberry forum - As an example: Booting Raspbian on large (>2TB) USB devices : Made Easy (Of Interest may be the Link towards the side talking about hybrid MBRs), and (or foremost) Running Raspbian from USB Devices : Made Easy
Seem to be the case for some "RFTM" to do followed by some manual steps (and there seem to be various ways to get a working solution) to be done, but in the end it should be possible. And maybe you can share your success here if you are willing to do that :D
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@killrbill
See if this works for you:
https://kb.paragon-software.com/article/1479
and look for the section titled:
Convert to GPT (for MBR/rGPT disk)This will most likely wipe out all data and partitions on the drive when it converts so make sure you save anything you may want to keep from the disk first.
After you convert the disk to GPT, then you can create partitions and format the filesystem to your liking.
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Okay so here goes the current state of play.
Installed Windows via boot camp.
Opened disk management.
Deleted all volumes.
Converted disk to GPT.
Formatted drive in exFat.
Installed RetroPi image.
Got the same error when plugged into Pi400.
Tried the same process again but this time using NTFS.
Still got the same error.Going to the pub!
Will return to this fight tomorrow.
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@killrbill said in Is a 4TB HDD just too big?:
Going to the pub!
Will return to this fight tomorrow.
The best course of action in this situation. Cheers. o/ᵁ
On topic: Two ideas.
- Create two partitions with </= 2 TB for the one with RetroPie on it. You can always link or mount their directories with or onto another later. That would even give you the option to format the second one with NTFS or FAT32, so you can access it in Windows directly in addition to all the other ways.
- Create one partition </= 2TB, let RetroPie expand it, and resize it and its file system to the full 4 TB later using a Linux live system or another RetroPie installation. (AFAIK, Windows can't do that because its ootb tools are limited to Windows file systems. 🤨 )
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@killrbill As said, the Image contains the partition table and partitions - if you write that to the HDD it will always become MBR+FAT32 boot partition+root partition (ext4). Here is another threat about the topic in the official reaspberry forum (hinting at the same solution of the second link i previosly posted): USB boot raspberry pi from a 4TB external USB disk drive
Edit: In the past, the recommendations you may have found to use SD-Formatter or such (with SD-Cards/USB-Memory-Sticks/etc.) to wipe the card/stick, where meant to "refresh"/"Low-Lewel-Format" the Media, and which by then put a single partition in some "based on media size" and preferring exFAT for larger sizes on it... In fact, the "low-level-format" was what was desired to regain the "real"/"usable" size of the media (besides regaining lost ones it also wiped out bad sectors (not sure about that one)) and that was it. No further partitioning or such(!), as writing a raspberry OS/retropie/OSMC/LibreELEC/etc. image to a medium would totally wipe that media and replacing it with the information from the image -> meaning, with a good Media you wouldn't need to take any preceedings steps before writing the image to it, as writing the image to it would a) cleanse the drive and b) make it a "clone" of that drive the image was taken from (with a "shrinked" root partition) -> meaning, whatever you do to the drive before "installing" the image doesn't matter. ... And now you need to change that one, before booting from it, from MBR to GPT... Or you may take that image written to some SD-Card, prepare your drive to use GPT and then "clone" the partitions form the SD card (via Clonezilla, by hand via dd or whatsoever) to the GPT drive - but I am not sure if some flags of the partitions need to be adjusted from MBR to GPT. ...
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I've got an 8gb wd usb external plugged into my pi4 (libreelec) and it works fine.
However I also created the partitions and formatted it from the raspi4 using buster and gparted.
No experience w Mac's
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