Hi folks,
I am facing a problem I am not able to solve by myself, even not finding some useful information at all. This and the fact that it is a problem which seems very basic to me lead me more and more to the impression that I have a common misunderstanding or that I don’t see the forest for the trees.
What’s the matter?
I have flashed a RasPi 2B with a fresh Volumio 3 OS. I “just” want to use it to play music attached directly to the Pi, either placed on the SD card or on an attached USB stick, but I didn’t manage to do so.
I first tried to copy it directly to the SD card. Not possible due to not enough space on it, even though I used a 64GB one. The filesystem has not been expanded at first boot up as stated in the Quick Start Guide, no idea why. Flashing it to that SD card and expanding the partition right after with gparted leads to a SD card which is no longer booting, at least it doesn’t receive an IP neither on wired nor wireless interface, even though the LEDs are flickering so something seems to happen on the OS.
So I quit the option using the SD card directly and copied the music to an USB drive and attached it to the Pi. Also no success here: volume is not mounted automatically (can’t be intended to do that via SSH), neither as fat32 nor as ext3. I can’t pick any USB drive via source selection in UI, only real network drives with CIFS and NFS.
So: What can I do to be able to play music directly attached to the RasPi I set up?
Thanks in advance, if any logs are required please give me a hint.
Internal folder is the folder to put your files, if you add a usb stick you have to index your files
in left menu in sources :
click update or scan
if you added files local or with usb
I have the same set up- raspberry Pi 2b with a Hifiberry Digi +Pro HAT. iI am running Volumio 3.449.
I just tried to replicate your issue by:
Taking a new USB drive (SanDisk USB 3 32Gb).
Formatted as FAT32
Copied 2Gb of music files (FLAC format)
Unmounted drive from computer
Inserted drive into Raspberry Pi (which was powered and running Volumio)
Went to Home screen in Volumio and clicked on Music Library
USB shows in Music Library
Open USB folder and click on a track
Music plays
Hopefully you can replicate these steps. If not I might suggest a clean install of Volumio or just power of, disconnect from power supply, reconnect and power up.
One final thought, does you power supply have adequate power to run the Pi, whatever HAT you are using and the USB? 5 Volts at 2.5 Amps should be sufficient.
this has been obsolete for quite some time now (since the early days of Volumio 3).
Every time Volumio boots, the init procedure will look for free space in the data partition (partition #3). If it finds any (more than a few bytes), the partition will be expanded to the end of the disk. This is valid for all platforms.
Thanks to all for reply!
I’ve written now again Volumio 3.449 to the SD card, attached it to the Pi, started it almost 2 hours ago and checked just now for the partitions:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0 7:0 0 409.9M 0 loop /static
mmcblk0 179:0 0 58.9G 0 disk
|-mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 91.6M 0 part /boot
|-mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 2.5G 0 part /imgpart
`-mmcblk0p3 179:3 0 56.3G 0 part
Also top is not indicating any process which might still resize a partition. It’s just the same as the different tries before. I also switched to another power supply, a dedicated one for RasPi directly connected to +5V and GND via GPIO.
USB drive not showing up anywhere, neither at sources nor at music library
On the console it looks like
volumio@volumio:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0 7:0 0 409.9M 0 loop /static
sda 8:0 1 28.7G 0 disk
mmcblk0 179:0 0 58.9G 0 disk
|-mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 91.6M 0 part /boot
|-mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 2.5G 0 part /imgpart
`-mmcblk0p3 179:3 0 56.3G 0 part
So /dev/sda is there, but not mounted automatically
disk seems to expand and usb should mount it works on rpi4 after scan it’s all listed
but i can say only from what the pi4 says… got no pi2 /1g ( maybe this is a to slow system.)
it’s asking a bike to run like a car, it will come there but you have to wait for a while.
when the partition #3 expands properly, then ‘overlay’ will approx. have the size of that partition. This is not the case, so something still went wrong with flashing (this would not be the first user it happens to → try another tool) or there is something wrong with the SD.
Volumio’s init happens as part of the kernel boot process. Init won’t finish before the expansion is complete and the root filesystem is made available for the linux /debian/ volumio daemons to start. So it is not a matter of giving it time, in case you would prematurely reboot, before Volumio’s UI or login prompt appears, it would just re-start/ continue with partition expansion.
I also did this with different SD cards, what I didn’t change up to now is the flasher (which was Etcher). I will give it a try with a different tool. But what makes me not so confident that there is a problem with the flashing tool is that the system seems to behave normal beside from those problems with partitions and USB mount: it boots up, UI is working, I can go through setup assistant, can switch from wired to wireless network, can enable SSH and log into the system and so on.
it’s an issue we have seen before and sofar nobody found out the exact reason for it. There is something odd with the partition table, which causes Volumio not to see the size of the data partition properly.
All vital info is on partition 1 and 2, so yes, the system will start and appear to run ok. However, you will run into space issues when installing plugins, music etc., which all goes to the overlay. In your case the overlay is limited in space, because it is supposed to span the entire data partition, which has not been expanded. Try Rufus.
Flashed the SD card now with dd, same behavior as before. System is up now for half an hour, but if I got @gkkpch correctly the resizing of the partition is part of the boot process and supposed to be finished when the UI is up and the system is running completely.
I really don’t understand what is going on here?!
most likely not, the partition size is still untouched. There is definitely something wrong with the SD after flashing.
I know the Volumio initrd inside out, for all platforms, and admit having no idea why on earth a Pi fails in very rare occasions with certain SD or flash tools where we never ever get such reports from any of the supported and community platforms.
Yes indeed, I already changed the SD card and the flashing tool. What I still can do is using yet another card (only tried two different up to now) and another card reader: I always used a USB one because it has a microSD slot, but I will try with an adapter in my Thinkpad directly.
I will let you know about any further steps, but on weekend I might not find the time.
@gkkpch
If this is such a rare situation, are there any logs I can provide for further understanding? Did I get you right when you are saying I am not totally alone with this issue, but it happens very seldom?
Beside of that: many thanks to all for that lively discussion!
