No drives show up in Orbitor on core

[elboy0712]

Ok I am only running the one main machine at the moment as a hybrid. Before when I have loaded MCE the drive detection seemed to be functioning. Now I see only the DVD drive in the Manage Drives menu. All my drives show up in KDE including the USB hard drive. But none in LMCE. Is there something I have to do to make them visible to MCE?

[Zaerc]

Make sure they aren't mounted and let LMCE detect them.

[Stutch]

Mighty Lord of the LinuxMCE,

Do these drives need to be partitioned and formatted in order to be detected by LunuxMCE?  (My assumption is yes.)

[Zaerc]

Partitioning and formatting: yes, mounting: no.

Basicly the system should find formatted partitions and ask you what to do with them, unless you jumped the gun and mounted them somewhere already.

[Stutch]

I will give that a try this evening.  Thank you!

[Stutch]

I am still having an issue.  When I install Kubuntu, I can see all 5 hard drives under the system configuration, and I partition and format them as directed in this forum.  They are mountable and I have full access to the drives.  I did not mount them in this most recent attempt because of what I learned in this series of posts.  However, after the LinuxMCE installer is completed, I see 10 drives, 5 that are identified and 5 that are not.

1) Can anyone explain to me why the LinuxMCE installer is duplicating my disk drives?

2) How should the additional drives show up within Linux MCE?  Shouldn't I be able to select one of these drives as the destination when ripping movies?

3) Is it possible to manually mount / configure hard drives in Linux MCE?  Perhaps create a mount point that allows these drives to show up in the window for Managed Drives?

Thank you!

[Zaerc]

I don't know what's exactly going on with your setup, but do you see the drives in the web-admin's devices tree?

[Stutch]

I see only one hard drive under the device tree, and that is called 9650, which is the model of my raid controller.

Should I see all 5 drives under here?

[Stutch]

I miss spoke.  I have only one hard drive showing up under the device tree with the generic name "Hard Drive" and another device called "9650".  I happen to be using a 3Ware 9650 Raid controller.

Can I manually mount these drives in such a way that LinuxMCE can utilize them?  How do I make LinuxMCE detect these drives, is there something that I can do?

[tschak909]

No, you can not manually mount the drives.

You can however, create a new device in the web admin panel. Type in 1790 in the device template field, and click pick device template.

Once this device is created, you can fill out the fields below relevant to your device, and click save, then reload the router. LMCE will then manage the drive.

However, it sounds like from your description, that the Device is already in the tree... you may want to select it, scroll down to Online, and see if it is checked.

I would like to point out, that if you have a drive that is not part of the standard disk naming convention (the filesystem isn't mounted from /dev/sdxY), the storage radar will not work properly and you will have all sorts of problems.

-Thom

[Stutch]

Ok, I think I understand partially what you are telling me.  Under the device tree, I only see one hard drive, which is the drive that installed the OS on.  The other 5 drives are not detected automatically.
So here is how my raid is configured:

3Ware 9650se SATAII Raid controller:
8 Western Digital SATAII Terabyte Hard Drives - Configured as a single 6TB Raid 6 disk.
Due to restrictions in either the OS or my BIOS, I enabled auto carving on the raid controller.  This causes the 6TB drive to be carved up into 1TB drives (6 total) and presented to the OS as such.

Linux MCE is installed on /dev/sda 0,0,0 .  What do I have to do to the other 5 drives to make them show up?  Do I need to do anything under Kubuntu before running the LinuxMCE disk?

After the LMCE is installed, if they do not show up automatically, what information do I need to enter into the template to make the hard drive function?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[colinjones]

Stutch

In LMCE the storage radar needs to find your drives and mount them for you so that LMCE can use them. If you mount it manually then it won't be integrated with LMCE and so won't work properly. But Thom seems to be saying that the storage radar expects the device names to be specifically /dev/sda<num> or similar. I think perhaps because you have a special controller perhaps the driver is creating drive device names outside that naming convention and so storage radar doesn't see them.

You should check to see what names it is giving the devices - not sure how to show that, does df show unmounted drives? But if that is the problem then you will either have find a way to change the device name it creates, or modify the radar script to capture the device name it creates (I think it might be this one /usr/pluto/bin/StorageDevices_Radar.sh)

[Stutch]

Excellent.

I realized what I was doing wrong.  I was formatting the hard drives but not partitioning them first.

After I figured that out, I was able to partition the hard drives using FD, and then properly format them.  When I started up LinuxMCE the radar detected all 5 drives.

Now I am at the point where I am loading up the first Media Device (MSI Media Live).   Will keep you updated on progress.

Thank you Thom and Colin!!