USB Flash Drive mount Fails

[silverdevil]

Hi guys,

Freenas newbie here and I am at wit's end trying to do what seems to me the simplest of tasks: mounting a USB flash drive to import into a dataset. Here's my setup:

Hardware:
Supermicro Atom A1SAi-2750F motherboard (2x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0)
4x 3TB WD HDD
1x 128 GB SSD
1x 120 GB SSD
16GB of EEC ram

OS:
FreeNAS v9.3 Stable

Tunables:
xhci_load YES loader

Services (on):
CIFS
Rsync

User/Group Setup:
ntropy:L5 (see screenshot of permissions)

I have 2 pools set up:
1) gigaflare ( made up of 3x 3TB drives in RAID-Z2 for streaming media/unified file storage for the family)

2) megaflare (2x SSD for frequently accessed files in MIRROR)

No real data has been uploaded to the server, as I am still testing. I have created a few working CIFS testing shares such as:
mnt/megaflare/documents
mnt/megaflare/jails


So today I want to test out my methods before i go ahead and start importing my larger external drives, and i start to import disk a FAT32 4GB flash drive onto a new dataset at
"mnt/gigaflare/test"

I plug my flash drive into a USB 3.0 port on my freenas machine and goto import disks and start the process.
But after it appears to start up fine, it give me the message, "Import of Volume /dev/da1s1 Failed. Reason Import Process was Abruptly Terminated."

Why did this happen? this is killing me. I tried everything and feeling very hopeless because I thought I was good at windows, but moving to Freenas has been a very steep learning curve and very humbling. Please see relevant snapshots and output of /var/run/importcopy/vol_rsync_stats file

Thanks in advance.
Jerry

 

[BigDave]

Fat32 is a windoze file system, since 9.x FreeNAS is zfs only. You can temp. import a disk with ufs on it, but have not heard of someone try to mount
a usb drive with fat32...
Why just simply connect the disk to your client and copy over the network???

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sayin' you can't, I've just never heard of someone tryin' that.
Perhaps it is the USB 3.0 that's the issue, try a usb2.0 port...

 

[silverdevil]

I have a wireless N network. If i plug into my laptop, the transfer speed is like 1-2 MB/s. That's very painful and slow because it would go from USB>laptop>router>freenasbox. I could plug it into the computer with hard ethernet connection to router, but my dad sleeps in that room and i dont want to walk in and out bugging him all the time.

I tried USB 2.0 port as well. It failed. Incidentally, I also tried an NTFS drive and that also failed. I thik this is a permissions problem somehow. If i cant get all this data to import im basically screwed and freenas is useless to me. :(

 

[dlavigne]

Any other messages in /var/log/messages to help figure out why it failed?

 

[silverdevil]

deleted

 

[silverdevil]

Any other messages in /var/log/messages to help figure out why it failed?

unfortunately, no. i didn't check that immediately. just checking, as i am new to this: to output logs, i am just typing things like:

view /var/log messages
or
view /var/run/importcopy/vol_rsync_stats

and then copying them to my clipboard and pasting to txt file. is this the right way of showing logs to people? or am i doing it a stupid way and missing something? thanks. sorry for the ignorance.

also i was doing more research and found this:
http://www.erdmanor.com/blog/mounting-windows-partitions-freenas-9-x/

is this likely to be the solution? i will try it tomorrow. seems like what i need to accomplish can only be done with the command line and not the GUI due to kldload not being loaded properly? is it a bug?

thoughts appreciated. thanks

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Are you following the directions?

 

[silverdevil]

Are you following the directions?

I think so.. did you spot something that suggested that i didn't? I definitely referenced the manual before i came here :(

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I just wanted to be sure, you mentioned going to "import disks", so it wasn't 100% clear.

EDIT: and you quoted a fairly dubious external source.

 

[silverdevil]

I just wanted to be sure, you mentioned going to "import disks", so it wasn't 100% clear.

EDIT: and you quoted a fairly dubious external source.

Oh, well, I was trying to search online, finding solutions for myself. Any source is better than whats in my brain currently. But for my initial trial, i followed the instructions as best I could and documented with photos. Still looking for a solution, please let me know if you have any ideas..

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I don't see anything obviously wrong with your process. The article you linked to is about mounting an NTFS partition, so I don't think that will help.

I wonder if your flash drive has a problem.

Since you're only dealing with 1.2GB of data, I suggest just biting the bullet and copying it over the network. It may be painful but it's a one-time thing.

 

[silverdevil]

I don't see anything obviously wrong with your process. The article you linked to is about mounting an NTFS partition, so I don't think that will help.

I wonder if your flash drive has a problem.

Since you're only dealing with 1.2GB of data, I suggest just biting the bullet and copying it over the network. It may be painful but it's a one-time thing.

hi robert,

thanks for your reply. well it is a generic drive, but i think it says a lot about freenas if it cant handle a drive that writes and copies fine on every other OS. I am considering just doing everything by network, but unfortunately this 1.2 gb fat32 is only sample data. i have terabytes on terabytes to transfer on other NTFS drives. I have tried to mount other NTFS drives in the same way and they all got hung at 50%. thats why i was trying to mount a small usb. so it wouldnt take forever before i realized there was a failure. really frustrated, ill try to post snaps of an ntfs mount later. ideas appreciated. i have a hunch this is a permissions problem..

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I have tried to mount other NTFS drives in the same way and they all got hung at 50%.

Were you trying to import to gigaflare or megaflare? According to your screenshot, the latter only has just over 100Gb available.

i have a hunch this is a permissions problem.

Could be, but in that case I'd expect it to fail much sooner than 50%.

 

[silverdevil]

Were you trying to import to gigaflare or megaflare? According to your screenshot, the latter only has just over 100Gb available.

Could be, but in that case I'd expect it to fail much sooner than 50%.

Well, I tried to import a 600GB NTFS drive about a week ago, via the exact same process, but using NTFS option, of course. I was importing to a directory called "test" in gigaflare, which has several terabytes of space in a RAID-Z2 configuration. I never got an error message or termination message, it just hung. I waited 2 hours, then gave up and i clicked "send to background" to try to figure it out, and nothing ever came of it. So i eventually rebooted. On my laptop, i browsed the freenas directory on my network (CIFS shared), I did see that the file structure (folders etc) of my attempted mount was created, but no actual files were written. very unusual. Any ideas of what happened?

Writing this FAT32 USB drive i actually get a termination message, saying mounting failed, as shown above.

 

[silverdevil]

interestingly, when I plugged the failed mount NTFS external drive mount back into my laptop to use, i notice that a new user permission was created "CREATER OWNER" and special permissions was checked. also, before i write anything to the drive, win7 bugs me about needing administrator access, which i have to click ok to before it lets me do my thing. So something definitely changed on the external drive after the failed mount.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I tried to import a 600GB NTFS drive about a week ago ... I waited 2 hours, then gave up

At the maximum USB2 speed of 480Mbps, 600GB would take almost 3 hours to transfer. Since you won't actually achieve 480Mbps, you should expect it to take longer than 3 hours. Maybe you just didn't wait long enough.

One way to monitor the process would be to open a 2nd browser tab on the FreeNAS Reporting screen and watch disk and pool activity.

 

[silverdevil]

At the maximum USB2 speed of 480Mbps, 600GB would take almost 3 hours to transfer. Since you won't actually achieve 480Mbps, you should expect it to take longer than 3 hours. Maybe you just didn't wait long enough.

One way to monitor the process would be to open a 2nd browser tab on the FreeNAS Reporting screen and watch disk and pool activity.

hi robert,

thanks for your reply. actually im fortunate that the external drive is USB3 and so is my motherboard. i have xhci loaded. so i think it should take 1 hour tops.

i will definitely monitor the activity like you suggested. where is the reporting tab located? do i have to type a shell command? sorry not too familiar with the gui

thanks

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

im fortunate that the external drive is USB3 and so is my motherboard

But unfortunately FreeNAS/FreeBSD don't always play nicely with USB3, so best to use USB2 for now.

where is the reporting tab located?

Just go into the GUI, you'll see it's one of the main tabs.

 

[silverdevil]

But unfortunately FreeNAS/FreeBSD don't always play nicely with USB3, so best to use USB2 for now.

Just go into the GUI, you'll see it's one of the main tabs.

okay ill try it again.. but for the record i also plugged it into usb2 and also failed. i think i need someone generous enough to help me look at it with me on teamviewer or something. i have this gut feeling a lot of fancy shell stuff has to be done and permissions and users tweaked. :(