[TriLUG] 4TB GPT Disk fails to Mount with Tomato 2.6.22.19 Kernel

[Alan Sterger]

Thomas et al,

Thank you for the reply.  Yes I've been working this issue for a while now.

To reply to an earlier idea, Tomato uses stripped down embedded linux 
relying heavily on BusyBox.  Unfortunately, that means no LVM support.

I paid ~$400 for this box specifically for the RAID capability.  I 
initially had it configured RAID-1 for security and formatted NTFS.  
This worked with the Linksys E3000 factory firmware which only supports 
FAT32 and NTFS.  I then purchased Acronis True Image for backup.  
Acronis produces a single large compressed image of the drive.  My 
~160GB backup took 13+ hours to write out with no verification.  I 
needed a faster alternative.  Thought RAID-0 would provide better 
performance as well as going to a non-journaling filesystem.

Yesterday, reinitialized the drive to individual (2LUN) drives and 
formatted both as ext2.  As expected this worked.

 From the 4 available configuration modes: RAID-0, RAID-1, SPAN, 2LUN 
only the half capacity (2TB/MBR) RAID-1 and 2LUN modes mount in Tomato.  
The 4TB/GPT modes RAID-0 and SPAN do not.  4TB/GPT works well in Windows 
Vista.

I was hoping someone here might be into rolling their own kernel or 
third-party router firmware and could point me or hack this problem for 
me (compensated of course).  If not, I'll just have to use lower 
capacity RAID-1 or individual disks until linux catches up to Windows.

Cheers,

Alan Sterger


On 8/13/2012 3:08 PM, Thomas Gardner wrote:
> OK, I started doing some Googling, and saw some other places where
> you've asked for help with this.  Obviously it's a real thorn for you.
>
> I've only just started looking around, but two thoughts occur to me
> about how to jury-rig something together that will do what you want.
> I kind of mentioned the first one earlier, and that is:  Isn't there
> a mode on this thing that will present two separate drives to your
> Tomato device?  I would have thought that's what the JBOD mode would
> have been, but apparently not....
>
> Second, if the above doesn't work, I noticed while I was reading some
> other responses, there seemed to be some question as to whether or
> not the SATA-USB bridge used on this thing is really all that well
> supported in any Linux, particularly in the kernel used in Tomato.
> Have you considered just buying a pair of cheap ones that are known
> to be supported by Linux and replace whatever is in your magic box
> with a couple of those?  They're easy enough to find:  Just scan
> the reviews at a place like NewEgg ur sumsuch for Linux and buy two
> of the cheapest one (or the one with the most favorable reviews or
> whatever else you generally go by) you can find where someone else
> reports it worked for them on their Linux box.  Plug each one into
> each of your drives, plug both of them into your little Tomato box,
> and now, hopefully you'll see two devices (sda and sdb).  It might
> look like frankenbox with wires sticking out and running all over,
> but if it works, you can almost always find ways to hide the ugly
> (or at least minimize it).
>
> The point for both of these dirty hacks would be:  If you can see
> the two disks separately, you should then be able to use LVM to
> concatenate them to get what you want (check to make sure Tomato
> actually supports LVM before doing any of the above, of course).
>
> Even if you can't get Tomato to concatenate two separate drives, maybe
> you can figure out a way to just go ahead and mount them separately and
> spread your data out (more or less) evenly between the two mountpoints.
>
> BTW, I've got some SATA-USB converters that I know are supported in
> Linux which I can loan to you to see if plan B will actually work
> before you go out and order any new equipment.  The things are cheap,
> but even when cheap, it's a waste to buy something that doesn't help
> your problem.
>
> L8r,
> tg.
>
> On 8/13/12, Alan Sterger<asterger at earthlink.net>  wrote:
>> Thanks for the reply Jack and Thomas.  Didn't want to post dmesg unless
>> there was any interest.
>>
>> RAID box is configured as JBOD at present.  This mode concatenates the
>> 2-2TB drives into one 4TB span.  Its not working either, virtually the
>> same errors and dmesg as the RAID-0 configuration.
>>
>> Tomato sees the block device /dev/sda but not the /dev/sda1 partition.
>> It does work fine configured as RAID-1 (2TB) but I loose half capacity.
>>
>> dmesg can be found at http://pastebin.com/yAq2McpU (if I set up the
>> account correctly).
>>
>> Any help will be appreciated.
>>
>> -- Alan Sterger