Help please with an external disk drive

Hello,

I have a WD Elements 1TB SSD which came from the shop NTFS formatted. I plugged it into the PI and tried to use !HForm to format it for use with RISC OS, it seemed to go ok until it got to the point “Writing root directory”, at which point it froze, I left it overnight and pulled the plug in the morning with it still at the same point. I then tried creating a FAT32 partition on a windows machine, this worked fine, but when I plugged it in and tried to open the disk on RISC OS the whole computer locked up. The next thing I tried was using Partition Manager to format the disk, creating a FAT partition it froze whilst writing the partition table with the error “Failed to read the existing boot sector”, I also tried to format it as Filecore, this froze at the point “Query drive SCSIFS 1/32”, with no error message.

In between some of these steps I’ve used the command wipefs on a linux box to delete the existing filesystem, hoping to start from a blank slate, but it didn’t help.

I’m aware I’ve made a right hash of this, can anyone help me out of my self-made mess.

Thank you,
Andrew

I have a WD Elements 1TB with a spinning HDD.
I delete the NTFS partition with gparted in Linux and create a new MBR.
I format the Disc with !HForm to the max. possible 256GB.
With Antons PartiFC I create a FAT partition behind the Filecore one withbthe rest discspace and format with fat32formatter.
All is working well. FileCore is usable and the FAT32 partition I can use with FAT32FS.

I’ve tried your suggestion, used Gparted to create a MBR partition table, then format on RISC OS with !HForm to the max possible size. It’s got stuck again “Writing root directory”.

This may or may not be relevant, but I have made this note in the root of my SD card. If not directly relevant, it may help someone else having problems with discs.

Following the corruption of my 1 TB HD, replacing it with the contents and title of the RPi Boot SD card, the solution was as follows:

Not sure if this will help, but when !Hform asks you to specify a LFAU (large file allocation unit), I recommend doubling the suggested value. I find that it can be a bit over-aggressive in its suggestion, and sometimes this is a problem. ie. if it recommends 2048 then enter 4096. If 8192 then 16384.

The other possibility is that the drive isn’t getting enough power. Some drives tend to need a bit more juice than a single USB 2 port can offer. Many use USB 3 single cables which allow for nearly twice the power delivery on a USB3 port. ARM boards are extremely conservative in the power-per-port offered, and this can cause problems with devices which draw power from the computer.

an -o parameter which will rewrite a FAT partition table to restore the full capacity as a single partition.

Android does that automatically. It was a bit of a shock when I went to clear the little FAT partition and ended up with an enormous one.

Thankfully DiscKnight was able to furtle around to find the root directory and build enough of a FileCore drive that the SD card could be mounted and the files copied off, before reformatting it using SystemDisc. I think only a couple of files were damaged, and that’s only because Android is incapable of mounting media without spewing a bunch of empty directories.