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Forum Discussion
How can I format a new USB drive?
I bought a brand new 2T drive to backup my ReadyNAS for offsite storage. When I plug the drive in, the ReadyNAS does not recognize it and gives me no way to format it. It doesn't show up in the System->Volumes tab, or any place else on the UI that I can find. I tried to format it as a ExFAT on my Mac and when I plug it in it says "System: External storage device is connected but the file system is not recognized." but it *still* doesn't give me a way to format the drive! How can I format it on the ReadyNAS?
I am using firmware 6.8.0 which is the latest.
3 Replies
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ReadyNAS doesn't support exfat,
Could do please formart USB to HFS on MAC or NTFS on Windows, then connect to NAS, the USB should be mount?
You can see the USB driver on NAS admin GUI System-> Overview page, and you can format it here.
Thanks for the response, but there are several problems here. If the drive is completely new and has no filesystem on it, attaching it to the ReadyNAS via USB does not present the drive in any way for you to format it. You apparently have to format the new drive on a separate system (e.g. Linux machine or Mac) before you can attach it to the ReadyNAS.
Further, formating it to ext4 via Linux (e.g. Ubuntu) ultimately fails. While the drive shows up under System->Overview, backing up to it fails after a while. I get a hundred or so warnings about virus (usually in Junk mail folders on my IMAP server that is getting backed up), and a bunch of files appear to get copied, eventually the backup fails with a message such as:
Backup Status: Fail: Destination is read-only or files/folders could not be created. Check if these files or folders meet the destination file system limitation.
Cannot create file '/media/USB_HDD_6/Music/Rock/Jonny Lang/Lie To Me/Matchbox Jonny Lang.mp3' (error: Read-only file system)!
It appears as if the USB drive has (suddenly?) gone read-only.
I'm going to try again after reformating the drive through the ReadyNAS UI (click on the drive's gear, then Format-> EXT4). The last time I tried this, the format never completed, but it seems to this time so I'll see if formating it through the ReadyNAS UI fixes the read-only filesystem problem.
FYI, the USB disk is 2T while I've got 909GB free on the ReadyNAS's 2T drives, so there should be plenty of space on the USB drive to complete the backup.
pumpichank wrote:
It appears as if the USB drive has (suddenly?) gone read-only.
If the disk isn't ejected from the software, then the dirty bit on the drive often gets set. The NAS will then mount the drive as read-only.
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