x86: mounting a sata exfat drive that contains music files

Help and Support Help
1

I am trying to “auto” mount an exFAT sata drive on a Minnowboard turbot, booting from an sd card. The img is 2.394 dev. By “auto” mount I mean that it must mount at each reboot.

The following, as you will see, is from an absolute beginner with linux.

This is how far I have got:

  1. get to the terminal window:

Press CTRL+ALT+F1 login with volumio and volumio

  1. get volume info
sudo blkid

  1. find the volume, in my case it is /dev/sda1

  2. make directory to hold the mount

sudo mkdir /media/exfat
  1. mount the device
sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sda1 media/exfat

At this point I have not received any errors, I assume it worked. But, I cannot find anyway to get back to Volumio to test it. Typing “exit” temporarily flashes the Volumio UI but redirects back to the terminal shell.

And then rebooting does not result in the mounting of the drive automatically at reboot.

Thanks for any help,
John

2

Check that you have the appropriate driver installed to read/write exfat.

3

I think you have to mount it to something in “/data/INTERNAL”, not tried it yet .
Create a folder and mount it there, curious…

We have an improvement coming up for this sort of usage, but this takes us up the Debian stretch road and is not for beta yet…

4

It looks like the only way to get the disk to mount at boot up is to edit the /etc/fstab file. I tried vim but it appears it is not installed. What is the text editor you have installed?

And, yes exfat-fuse and exfat-utils are both installed with this img.

5

I don’t think that changes to fstab survive rebooting. You could put it in a bash script, and include it in rc.local, for example.

Try ‘nano’ for your editor.

6

OK, so adding the mount command to /etc/rc.local worked.

Now, it appears that the USBStreamer that was recognized is no longer recognized. I’ll try to figure that out, but it’s beginning to look like volumio is not for me.

7

OK, so that’s too bad, I’m going to half to sign-off now.

I already have a headless system working on this computer using Windows embedded 8.1 and foobar2000. It, of course lacks Spotify, which brought me here. But my lack of linux knowledge and the just the fact that this system on my hardware is so far from anything resembling stable, I just don’t know how I could help or you guys could help me.

The way it is now, USBStreamer sometimes works sometimes not, things don’t get saved correctly between boots, even though it’s says it’s playing I don’t hear anything, the list goes on, it’s just not usable.

Thanks for all your help up to now, and keep up the good work.

Cheers,
John

8

Sorry to hear that John. It’s difficult to give advice when you don’t detail what you have tried and what doesn’t work. So for example, I’m still not clear where you finally have the USB drive mounted … did you put it at /data/INTERNAL as suggested by gkkpch? Are you getting any error messages? Feel free to raise questions here, because it will aid the direction of future development, and make for a better experience for those following in your footsteps.

The x86 version of Volumio is very heavily under development, and is necessarily more complex than say that for RPi, because of the multitude of hardware combinations.

9

@jonpb: what version of Volumio and on what kind of PC is it running?

There are two main issues with x86 we are aware of:

  • not booting due to unsupported (newish) storage controllers
  • difficulties with usb audio devices due to the old usb sound driver in the current kernel version

Your streamer issue could be due to the second one.
For that you could try our dev version as described in this link

The kernel used in there be in the upcoming Beta for a Debian stretch based Volumio version.