Pogoplug SATA Port - Acts oddly

Been having issues with the pogoplug native on-board SATA... When I try to mount a drive that has a partition on it, it sees no partition, just the drive (checked using lsblk). However if I try to plug the drive in by USB it works just fine... I've been told it might be a caching issue or a drivers issue on the pogoplug. Further oddness ensues when I make a partition on the pogoplug, and all other computers say that the partition is outside the disk... Does anyone have any experience with working with a pogoplug's native SATA?

Is the drive formatted Ext3 or 4 and has a label? I had the same issue but am too noob to remember the answer, but I know I'll be coming back to this soon.

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-= Cloud 9 =-

Ancient Abysswalker Wrote:
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> Been having issues with the pogoplug native
> on-board SATA... When I try to mount a drive that
> has a partition on it, it sees no partition, just
> the drive (checked using lsblk). However if I try
> to plug the drive in by USB it works just fine...
> I've been told it might be a caching issue or a
> drivers issue on the pogoplug. Further oddness
> ensues when I make a partition on the pogoplug,
> and all other computers say that the partition is
> outside the disk... Does anyone have any
> experience with working with a pogoplug's native
> SATA?

The Pogo Pro SATA behaves exactly the same as in any other SATA port.

Try looking at the disk structure with both fdisk and parted. What capacity ? does it have MBR or GPT partition table? Have you try remove all partitions and recreated a new partition? is this HDD a brand new one or has it been used before?

-bodhi
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Completely zeroed the drive - it's old, like I mean REALLY OLD (1990s?) - 80GB drive. Zeroed it when nothing else worked. Used gparted after having extensive issues when I did command line (same issues but being goodish at troubleshooting I tried different approaches). GPT part table and NTFS primary partition (also tried ext3 but I may have done it wrong by not resetting the part table before making a new primary part?)... The issue is so odd that I really have no idea what might be the cause... Could there possibly be a HDD fault causing issues between the raspberry pi and the pogoplug when reading from SATA vs USB? Is it possible that somehow the partition information is being stored on an on-board chip on my 3.5" drive enclosure - causing partition read issues when not using it when doing the SATA connection? (my enclosure is from an older seagate data storage drive for external-to-the-pc use).

P.S. I was going to plug the drive in to my desktop via SATA to see how that reacted but I ran out of time before I got shipped out again for work. I won't be able to do that again for two weeks :/

Try using fdisk to wipe and create an MBR partition table, and then using ntfs-3g to format this partition as NTFS. I think it is possible that the Seagte enclosure has something to do with this (they don't expect people to reuse the HDD inside or install another HDD in it).

-bodhi
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Ancient Abysswalker Wrote:
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> Is it possible that somehow the partition information is
> being stored on an on-board chip on my 3.5" drive
> enclosure
>
Is it safe to assume you have a 3/5" HDD? If so, perhaps your PogoPlug does not have enough power to drive it?

Completely forgot to respond... Yes, 3.5" drive. No, it does spin up just fine - I'm not powering it by USB (well I kind of am - I tapped into the 12V power from the PSU and the 5V pin of a USB. Sounds super sketch but I did some pre-analysis and it seems stable and safe).

With regard to wiping and making a part table in fdisk... I must have missed that option when I tried, I looked for it and couldn't see it. What key after starting fdisk is it to wipe and make a new MBR/GPT part?

Ancient Abysswalker Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Completely forgot to respond... Yes, 3.5" drive.
> No, it does spin up just fine - I'm not powering
> it by USB (well I kind of am - I tapped into the
> 12V power from the PSU and the 5V pin of a USB.
> Sounds super sketch but I did some pre-analysis
> and it seems stable and safe).
>
Once the HDD has spun up, plug it into one of the USB2 ports on your PogoPlug and dump the output of dmesg here.

> With regard to wiping and making a part table in
> fdisk... I must have missed that option when I
> tried, I looked for it and couldn't see it. What
> key after starting fdisk is it to wipe and make a
> new MBR/GPT part?
>
Use (c/g)fdisk to create/delete partition. Then, use mkfs to format the partition. AFAICT, mkfs has many different variants. It depends on the filesystem, i.e. mkfs.ext4 is for ext4 filesystem, etc.

Ancient Abysswalker Wrote:

> With regard to wiping and making a part table in
> fdisk... I must have missed that option when I
> tried, I looked for it and couldn't see it. What
> key after starting fdisk is it to wipe and make a
> new MBR/GPT part?

fdisk -l will tell if you have a GPT or MBR table. When you run fdisk, use the o command to erase all partition, and use the n command to create new partition. So you just need to verify that it does not have GPT table.

-bodhi
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bodhi's corner (buy bodhi a beer)

do the following
Start fdisk to partition the USB2 or SATA drive:

fdisk /dev/sda

At the fdisk prompt, delete old partitions and create a new one:
Type o. This will clear out any partitions on the drive.

Type p to list partitions. There should be no partitions left.

Now type n,

then p for primary,

1 for the first partition on the drive, and then press ENTER, accepting default values.

Exit by typing w.

Create the ext3 filesystem:

mke2fs -j /dev/sda1


Job done!

It ended up being that my sata-usb cable has some weird proprietary integrated chip issue (I think??) that causes problems when trying to read data made when not plugged through the usb. In addition the sata port I tried as a backup in case this was the issue was also failed - meaning I couldn't identify the problem until I realized my sata failed too -_-

It works now though