[SOLVED] USB drive mount with root as owner, cannot be used

[Girafenaine]

Hello Mooders,

I have been a happy moode user for a few years. Moode runs on a raspi 4 with a USB drive attached, that offers all the music I have got for mpd library.

2 weeks ago Moode stopped to read the music on the USB drive. The radios are read with no issues, that’s not a sound issue, but some with the USB drive. The files are seen, but when I try to play one file, nothing happen, mpd runs and "times out". I have to restart mpd to use moode again.

I have not yet undestood why this happens, current clue is that the used partition is NTFS and mounted with root as owner, not like the 2 other ext4 partitions that are mounted as pi owner.

The following picture shows the "Stockage" partition which is mounted with root as owner.




I tried to change the ownership with no success. sudo chown -R pi:pi /media/Stockage runs for 20-30 seconds and exit with no errors, but nothing has changed, the owner is still root.

On my laptop, with the same USB drive, all 3 partitions are mounted as owned by my user ! (automatically - no fstab instructions). I canmot guess the difference on the raspi with Moode.



Could you give me a hand to find what I should change or check to be able to use this partition ?


Thanks !

[Nutul]

Hello Mooders,

I have been a happy moode user for a few years. Moode runs on a raspi 4 with a USB drive attached, that offers all the music I have got for mpd library.

2 weeks ago Moode stopped to read the music on the USB drive. The radios are read with no issues, that’s not a sound issue, but some with the USB drive. The files are seen, but when I try to play one file, nothing happen, mpd runs and "times out". I have to restart mpd to use moode again.

I have not yet undestood why this happens, current clue is that the used partition is NTFS and mounted with root as owner, not like the 2 other ext4 partitions that are mounted as pi owner.

The following picture shows the "Stockage" partition which is mounted with root as owner.




I tried to change the ownership with no success. sudo chown -R pi:pi /media/Stockage runs for 20-30 seconds and exit with no errors, but nothing has changed, the owner is still root.

On my laptop, with the same USB drive, all 3 partitions are mounted as owned by my user ! (automatically - no fstab instructions). I canmot guess the difference on the raspi with Moode.



Could you give me a hand to find what I should change or check to be able to use this partition ?


Thanks !

TTYTT I cannor say what suddenly started to get messy, but one thing is sure: you cannot change permissions/ownership on NTFS the way you would on a Ext? one.
Do you remember anything you did? It's very strange that moOde started misbehaving without anything having being changed under the hood...
Maybe you had another USB attached HDD which was Ext4, and now you replaced it with a new, bigger one, in NTFS...? Just wandering wild, as I have no other clue...

[Girafenaine]

Hello @Nutul , thanks for your post,

As you wrote, it’s strange that I met this issue "suddenly". I don’t remember exactly when this occurred. It may be that I change my setup with this ntfs partition instead of a ext4. Indeed I made such a change a few weeks ago. I believe that I had moode working with the new ntfs partition before it stops working, but I cannot swear.

The last change was a Moode update 2 weeks ago. The issue seemed to occur after this update, but I have to admit it seems strange and I may be wrong,

[Nutul]

Hello @Nutul , thanks for your post,

As you wrote, it’s strange that I met this issue "suddenly". I don’t remember exactly when this occurred. It may be that I change my setup with this ntfs partition instead of a ext4. Indeed I made such a change a few weeks ago. I believe that I had moode working with the new ntfs partition before it stops working, but I cannot swear.

The last change was a Moode update 2 weeks ago. The issue seemed to occur after this update, but I have to admit it seems strange and I may be wrong,

Indeed you might have done something weird, although you don't remember.
I suggest you have the partion be Ext4, but as I understand you are mostly under Windows, so the other choice is to format you external HDD to ExFat, transfer back the whole music, and have moOde update its library again.

P.S.
Always, ALWAYS tell the whole story here, no matter if you think things are relevant or not. We are prone to get p****ed when after 10 posts we discover some important detail had been omitted... ;-)

[Tim Curtis]

Hello Mooders,

I have been a happy moode user for a few years. Moode runs on a raspi 4 with a USB drive attached, that offers all the music I have got for mpd library.

2 weeks ago Moode stopped to read the music on the USB drive. The radios are read with no issues, that’s not a sound issue, but some with the USB drive. The files are seen, but when I try to play one file, nothing happen, mpd runs and "times out". I have to restart mpd to use moode again.

I have not yet undestood why this happens, current clue is that the used partition is NTFS and mounted with root as owner, not like the 2 other ext4 partitions that are mounted as pi owner.

The following picture shows the "Stockage" partition which is mounted with root as owner.




I tried to change the ownership with no success. sudo chown -R pi:pi /media/Stockage runs for 20-30 seconds and exit with no errors, but nothing has changed, the owner is still root.

On my laptop, with the same USB drive, all 3 partitions are mounted as owned by my user ! (automatically - no fstab instructions). I canmot guess the difference on the raspi with Moode.



Could you give me a hand to find what I should change or check to be able to use this partition ?


Thanks !

To troubleshoot try the following:

1. Navigate into /media/Stockage using the ls -al command and verify that your tracks are listed and that there are no rogue dot files i.e., hidden files and directories other than standatrd Linux . and ..
2. Menu, Library
3, REGENERATE Music Library

View the stats at the end of the moode log to verify the number of tracks successfully indexed.

Code:

moodeutl -l

View the MPD log for errors

Code:

cat /var/log/mpd/log

[Girafenaine]

Hello @Tim Curtis , thanks for your help.

The folders and files seem to be clean, there is no strange hidden files. I use linux as my main OS. I have run the commands you suggested.

The "regenerate" command succeeded and went through my 17k+ music tracks.

"mpc stats" shows the right number of indexed tracks.

"moodeutl -l" shows :
- some thumbnails generation errors : "thumb-gen: Error: imagecreatefromstring() failed:"…
- a right number of parsed folders by thumb-gen (about 2300)
- the following final error : "genLibraryUTF8Rep(): Error: file create failed: /var/local/www/libcache"

And eventually "cat /var/log/mpd/log | grep error" shows about 20 errors like this one :
Sep 24 18:31 : mpg123: mpg123_getformat() failed: A generic mpg123 error.
[src/libmpg123/parse.c:1276] error: Giving up searching valid MPEG header after 65536 bytes of junk.

And except for above errors, the log confirm that files were scanned and "updated".

I tried again to play some tracks, and it made mpd mad again. In the moodeutl -l" log I can see : "command/index.php: Connection to MPD failed". I have to restart mpd to be able to get moode UI responsive and play some radios.


Do these results give some clues ?

[TheOldPresbyope]

@Girafenaine 

Sounds like you have some corrupt files, or worse, corrupt sectors or master file table, in the NTFS partition. Have you access to a Windows host on which you could run chkdsk on your USB disk? It should take care of basic disk issues leaving corrupt music files to take care of. (Linux has fsck and ntfsfix but most folks find them much less useful that chkdsk.)

There's no a priori reason that an NTFS file system won't work with moOde/MPD but it's not a very good choice. The fact that the partition is mounted as root:root is a red herring. As it happens, I have an NTFS-formatted USB drive I used just the other day in an attempt to repro a problem reported by another user. I'm listening to an MP3 file from that drive via moOde right now. No problem with the drive, also mounted root:root (and not able to repro the other user's problem).

Regards,
Kent

[Girafenaine]

Hello,

I can give some more context, even if it does not help me to understand the issue I described above.

The issue started after I made an update of my main laptop drive on the usb drive. The usb drive is then plugged again on the raspberry as the music source. I did this update to get a new album I had on my laptop to the usb drive. I use LuckyBackup for my backups (which is a rsync frontend). The new album was then copied on the usb drive. And it plays on Moode… actually, it seems to be the only one album playing on Moode ! All the other older tracks I tried from the usb drive made mpd to run indefinitely and not responding, a restart being mandatory.

The new album, the only one I can play now, does not show any differences with other tracks as fas as owner (root) and permissions are concerned.

Perhaps the update process has change anything else, I can’t figure out what it could be, and how it could make a difference between the last album and the old ones.

[Girafenaine]

@Girafenaine 

Sounds like you have some corrupt files, or worse, corrupt sectors or master file table, in the NTFS partition. Have you access to a Windows host on which you could run chkdsk on your USB disk? It should take care of basic disk issues leaving corrupt music files to take care of. (Linux has fsck and ntfsfix but most folks find them much less useful that chkdsk.)

There's no a priori reason that an NTFS file system won't work with moOde/MPD but it's not a very good choice. The fact that the partition is mounted as root:root is a red herring. As it happens, I have an NTFS-formatted USB drive I used just the other day in an attempt to repro a problem reported by another user. I'm listening to an MP3 file from that drive via moOde right now. No problem with the drive, also mounted root:root (and not able to repro the other user's problem).

Regards,
Kent

Thanks @TheOldPresbyope for you post, that makes sense !

OK for the "red herring" about root:root mount.

I have only linux systems at home. I just run fsck and ntfsfix from moode on the usb drive, with no success. No errors were seen, and no change after reboot.

I would probably get rid of ntfs and use another file system. I wanted to have windows compatibility just in case I want to share easily. Fat32 or exfat should be more robust on linux…

[Tim Curtis]

Hello @Tim Curtis , thanks for your help.

The folders and files seem to be clean, there is no strange hidden files. I use linux as my main OS. I have run the commands you suggested.

The "regenerate" command succeeded and went through my 17k+ music tracks.

"mpc stats" shows the right number of indexed tracks.

"moodeutl -l" shows :
- some thumbnails generation errors : "thumb-gen: Error: imagecreatefromstring() failed:"…
- a right number of parsed folders by thumb-gen (about 2300)
- the following final error : "genLibraryUTF8Rep(): Error: file create failed: /var/local/www/libcache"

And eventually "cat /var/log/mpd/log | grep error" shows about 20 errors like this one :
Sep 24 18:31 : mpg123: mpg123_getformat() failed: A generic mpg123 error.
[src/libmpg123/parse.c:1276] error: Giving up searching valid MPEG header after 65536 bytes of junk.

And except for above errors, the log confirm that files were scanned and "updated".

I tried again to play some tracks, and it made mpd mad again. In the moodeutl -l" log I can see : "command/index.php: Connection to MPD failed". I have to restart mpd to be able to get moode UI responsive and play some radios.


Do these results give some clues ?

The error below indicates the Library tag cache was not created and thus nothing will show in the Library views. This type of error from the UTF8 Replacement function is likely because there are some non-UTF8 characters in one or more files that are for some reason are causing the function to fail.

Code:

- the following final error : "genLibraryUTF8Rep(): Error: file create failed: /var/local/www/libcache

The Prefs, UTF8 character filter option is best effort only and so YMMV. Try turning it off and see if the Library tag cache can be generated.