[PROBLEM] SSD Media / System Partition Issues

[TheOldPresbyope]

@japumpy 

I can't help but feel that you're making this too hard for yourself, but without more information I don't know what to suggest.

For most of us, simply flashing the moOde image to a good quality uSD card (class 10 works well) with appropriate credentials is sufficient to get a reliable, good performing system on anything from an RPi Zero to an RPi 4B (even an RPi CM4 in my case). I've also done it with a USB memory stick (or even a uSD card inserted into a USB carrier).

The image file already has two partitions baked into it. The first partition is small (about 1/4 GB) and contains the boot file system; the second (about 3.5GB) contains the root file system. When the resulting moOde system is booted the first time, the second partition and the root file system it contains are expanded to fill any remaining space on whatever medium it was flashed to.

Most of my music collection is on a NAS accessible to all my players. I do have one player on an RPi4B with a 1TB NVMe SSD attached via a USB3.0 adapter. It's automatically detected by moOdeOS and its contents are added to the Library database either manually or automatically if I've so set the Library options.


Regards,
Kent

[Nutul]

I followed your sage instructions using Rpi Imager and referred to your comprehensive thread

As many have said, things do work if the necessary initial steps are followed.

1. start Pi Imager
2. select the image to flash
3. click on the cog-wheel
4. now specify a username + password, a wi-fi access-point + password, and enable ssh
5. confirm the configuration and flash the image.

There's nothing more to it, no additional guides (the guide of @TheOldPresbyope is valid and useful only if for some reason you cannot use the Pi Imager, which as I understand, is not your case any more). It really takes a few seconds to configure everything. Give it another try, following my easy steps above.

[Spinner]

I'm building a system for a friend as he's spent a load of money on various streamers and has seen mine work well. So now he wants one.

System:

• RPi 3b
  
• SSD external USB 512MB Apacer - (yes Black Friday deal)
  

I've installed the latest mOode build as of 30th. Nov 23. The idea was to have local media on the drive along with the system. I've tried partitioning the drive, but the system doesn't boot up at all. So I'm back to one system partition.

Are you saying you are getting moOde installed and running on the USB SSD, and then using a windows machine to add an additional partition to the drive for the music files ?
If so, I wouldn't bother. Just use a folder on the normal partition or better yet, use a different physical drive for your media.

Partitioning a Linux system, with windows software is often problematic. Both the Mac "Disk Utility and many windows partition tools simply don't fully support ext3/4 filesystem

FWIW: Using an external SSD is much faster, and more reliable than using the SDcard slot.  Before I switched to using the USB SSD, i would often get a corrupted OS when the power died on our OpenMediaVault server. Even when using V10 or higher cards meant for video. With the SSD, it hasn't been an issue for over a year.

I would go read some recent tutorials about USB booting a Pi3, and apply that technique to installing MoOde. Otherwise just use the offfical MoOde install method.

This reflashing will wipe out everything on the system disk, including those gigabytes of music tracks if they've been added to it.

@japumpy

I agree with Kent. If you want to boot via SSD, great, but keep your media on a different PHYSICAL drive. You will REALLY thank him later for that advice.

If you absolutely need to use Balena Etcher, dd, or any other program that merely flashes a system image to a uSD card, SSD, or whatever, then I suggest you check my earlier thread HowTo: Install moOde without ...." 

Because of how Apple wants to push hardware sales by limiting OS updates,  many mac users, like myself, can't use the Mac version of the PiImager, because it is compiled for the newest MacOS versions.

Because of that I need to either use Balena Etcher and config wpa_supplicant, ssh, etc. the old way.... or used the Win64 version of PiImager.

[Tim Curtis]

@TheOldPresbyope My apologies for my late reply to this thread. Health issues!

I followed your sage instructions using Rpi Imager and referred to your comprehensive thread, for which I thank you. There are lots to learn! The result was, I'm afraid, the same. My main reason for using the SSD as a moOde drive is to improve performance. In the past, I have had major lag issues with the system. It seems this was down to uSD not being suitable for random access such as an SSD. I've similar issues with a USB stick (same reason).

I have actually used other players; however, I do prefer moOde overall. I think the community is also fun to deal with.

I'm sad to say I'm a little bit stuck.

It's a myth that high quality uSD cards are unreliable or that pulling the plug on a Pi corrupts these cards. 

I've been using high quality uSD cards as boot media for 10 years and only experienced maybe 3 or 4 bad cards. My cards get heavy write activity during development reloads and re-imaging and if I'm feeling a bit lazy I just cut power and still no issues whatsoever :-) Typical boot time for fresh image these cards on any of the quad-core Pi's is under 60 secs. 

My advice is to use Surveillance-grade uSD cards like the WD Purple QD101 cards from Western Digital.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088CD...UTF8&psc=1

Another tip is to always keep the boot media separate from the media used to store music files otherwise if the boot media also has your music files on it a re-flash will wipe those files and you will need to reload them.

There are two partitions on a moOde image: a small; Fat32 boot partition which can be seen by Win/Mac/Linux, and an EXT4 root partition that gets expanded at first boot to max size of boot media and which can only be seen by Linux. The root partition contains the RaspiOS/Linux files and directories for example /home, /etc, /var, /lib, /mnt and so on. moOde application files are in these directories.

I think if you use high qual uSD card and prep it using the instructions in the Setup Guide you will be all set. https://github.com/moode-player/moode/bl.../setup.txt

[Spinner]

It's a myth that high quality uSD cards are unreliable or that pulling the plug on a Pi corrupts these cards. 

I've been using high quality uSD cards as boot media for 10 years and only experienced maybe 3 or 4 bad cards. My cards get heavy write activity during development reloads and re-imaging and if I'm feeling a bit lazy I just cut power and still no issues whatsoever :-) Typical boot

FWIW: I use video class V10 or higher cards. My install of PiOS + OpenMediaVault would often not come back up when the power dropped (after our UPS ran out of juice). Swapping Pis didn't help either so it wasn't a specific card or pi.  Switching to running the OS/OMV on external  SSD did, and added a huge perfomance boost.

It is curious that it usually happened with the OMV server.   My other PIs were usually ok.

That said, I  agree, for most MoOde users, a good quality card is the simplest option and should work fine. High quality/Fast cards are cheap now. The problems of the past were often cheap cards. (When doing support for crystalbuntu and OSMC, we had countless install problems with cheaper cards and sticks that users had)

If the card ever dies... get another one for $20, and restore from cloned image. No worries about USB power requirements either.

@japumpy  i would follow Tim's advice.  For MoOde, just get a good quality uSD card for the OS, and you can use the USB SSD for storing the media.

[japumpy]

Wow! So much support. Thank you all very much.
A bit more background: Tim was very helpful in his advice in the past regarding speed issues I was having with my RPi running moOde that was net connected to my NAS. The issue was the media was just too big and (correct me please, @Tim Curtis if I'm misstating) the speed was adversely affected by the low R/W speeds to the SD card. The resolution was quick in that I stopped using the uSD and purchased an USB3.0 SSD (I know way OTT). It's been running non-stop and is very happy indeed. In fact, I'm using it on my home-built amp, DAC, and some new KEF R3 Meta 2 speakers. Sounds bloody excellent.

That's the reason why I was trying to incorporate both OS and media onto one SSD. From your combined advice, over the break I programmed a SanDisk uSD card and copied media (not an extensive library) to the external SSD drive. All seems well so far. I haven't noticed any slowdown. So, I'm shipping it to my friend to trial it and feedback.

Can I just say how good it is to have such a nice community here? You're all so helpful and patient. It is deeply appreciated.

[Nutul]

Can I just say how good it is to have such a nice community here? You're all so helpful and patient. It is deeply appreciated.

That's just because we were around Xmas.

[Tim Curtis]

Wow! So much support. Thank you all very much.
A bit more background: Tim was very helpful in his advice in the past regarding speed issues I was having with my RPi running moOde that was net connected to my NAS. The issue was the media was just too big and (correct me please, @Tim Curtis if I'm misstating) the speed was adversely affected by the low R/W speeds to the SD card. The resolution was quick in that I stopped using the uSD and purchased an USB3.0 SSD (I know way OTT). It's been running non-stop and is very happy indeed. In fact, I'm using it on my home-built amp, DAC, and some new KEF R3 Meta 2 speakers. Sounds bloody excellent.

That's the reason why I was trying to incorporate both OS and media onto one SSD. From your combined advice, over the break I programmed a SanDisk uSD card and copied media (not an extensive library) to the external SSD drive. All seems well so far. I haven't noticed any slowdown. So, I'm shipping it to my friend to trial it and feedback.

Can I just say how good it is to have such a nice community here? You're all so helpful and patient. It is deeply appreciated.

Nice DIY :-)
 "I'm using it on my home-built amp, DAC, and some new KEF R3 Meta 2 speakers. Sounds bloody excellent."

Mine are KEF Q60's from the old days, plus a nice modern HSU subwoofer.