why my ext4 formatted USB drives were not mounted and playable in my M3?

[Bike22]

Thank you all of you who have posted advice on this. I finally managed to make it work after days and days of puzzling and trials.

M3 Highland and a Samsung T7 SSD of 500GB - Ubuntu 22.04 for the setup using the Disks gui to build an MBR format twin partition SSD.

First I spent ages trying to make ext4 file systems work with two partitions - 300GB for TESLADRIVE and 200GB for Music but no matter what I tried with permissions and sizes, the second Music partition would never appear. I did try two-button reboot too. I tried changing the Music partition to exFAT and then to FAT but that made no difference.

Finally, I used the M3 screen option to format the entire SSD as one TESLADRIVE partition and took a look at it in Ubuntu. It had built it as exFAT so I deleted this big partition, created an identical but smaller exFAT partition of 300GB (with a single empty folder called TeslaCam), added a second exFAT partition called Music, copied into this Music partition some artists/albums/tracks and it all worked! Dashcam is happily recording and the music turns up as 'USB' in the media centre.

The Music partition does not need any top level folder - just drop the artist/album(s)/track(s) structure into the top level of the partition.
I added a Boombox folder and a LightShow folder but not sure that I'm going to need them.
Didn't change any permissions on either partition - looks like exFAT defaults to safe working options.

I'm not sure why the ext4 partitions wouldn't work but I suspect that somehow the ext4 TESLADRIVE partition was so unacceptable that the second partition was never read.

Hope this helps someone ...........

 

[JJC14]

Thank you all of you who have posted advice on this. I finally managed to make it work after days and days of puzzling and trials.

M3 Highland and a Samsung T7 SSD of 500GB - Ubuntu 22.04 for the setup using the Disks gui to build an MBR format twin partition SSD.

First I spent ages trying to make ext4 file systems work with two partitions - 300GB for TESLADRIVE and 200GB for Music but no matter what I tried with permissions and sizes, the second Music partition would never appear. I did try two-button reboot too. I tried changing the Music partition to exFAT and then to FAT but that made no difference.

Finally, I used the M3 screen option to format the entire SSD as one TESLADRIVE partition and took a look at it in Ubuntu. It had built it as exFAT so I deleted this big partition, created an identical but smaller exFAT partition of 300GB (with a single empty folder called TeslaCam), added a second exFAT partition called Music, copied into this Music partition some artists/albums/tracks and it all worked! Dashcam is happily recording and the music turns up as 'USB' in the media centre.

The Music partition does not need any top level folder - just drop the artist/album(s)/track(s) structure into the top level of the partition.
I added a Boombox folder and a LightShow folder but not sure that I'm going to need them.
Didn't change any permissions on either partition - looks like exFAT defaults to safe working options.

I'm not sure why the ext4 partitions wouldn't work but I suspect that somehow the ext4 TESLADRIVE partition was so unacceptable that the second partition was never read.

Hope this helps someone ...........

I have a similar setup, however do you get the odd hiccup to the music playback? I suspect it may be when some video is being written to the other partition, but do not know.

John

 

[Bike22]

I have a similar setup, however do you get the odd hiccup to the music playback? I suspect it may be when some video is being written to the other partition, but do not know.

John

No - I have no hiccups on the music playback. This model SSD should be plenty fast enough to cope with the work being thrown at it.
My only outstanding issue is that a couple of tracks refuse to play but I suspect they are either a format that is not acceptable or maybe corrupt in some way. I'll copy them again and see if that works - just two tracks so far.

 

[JJC14]

Thanks,

may try a different stick to see if it is any different

John