Adding second external 2 TB WD My Passport to RPi4 Installation causes both drives to make a clicking sound and vanish from blkid

So I have just recently installed OMV6 on an 8GB RPi4 following the general guidelines in this YouTube playlist from ShotokuTech, while supplementing the information with the updated OMV6 User guide, and the Installing OMV6 on RPi Guide found on omv-extras.org.

My goal, was to have a NAS with 2TBs of active data storage accessible over Windows network through SMB/CIFS shares, and a second storage unit to backup the first on regular intervals using RSYNC command. Pretty much what is outlined in the linked YouTube playlist from ShotokuTech.

The hardware I am using, is a brand new RPi4 8 GB version, The official RPi P4120 USB-C Power Adapter (Output: 5.1V, 3.0A, 15.3W ) and two brand new WD 2TB My Passport External Drives.

I followed the guidelines laid out in the videos, and in the online guides and had a working setup within a few hours. The problems began when I wanted to add the second hard drive and setup the RSYNC following this specific video from the play list.

The Problem:

As soon as I connect the second disk to the second USB3 port on the Pi both drives start making a clicking / beeping sound in a tick-tock way. As in one of them makes the sound, then the other one makes the sound, and this carries on and on. Before connecting the second drive, I can see the details of the first drive in the output of the blkid command. But when the second drive is connected, and the clicking / beeping sound is heard from the two drives, not only the second one is not shown, the first drive also dissappears from the blkid output.

I have checked the external hard drives, different cables, and even changed out the RPi4 board with another brand new identical board I had bought at the same time for another project (thinking I might have a faulty board) but the same issue still happens. The hard drives, and the cables are also working just fine on other systems. I even swapped out the cables to be sure but the problem persist. At some point, I thought this might have something to do with the EXT4 file system I have formatted the first hard drive in, so I tried XFS next but with the same results. I also ran apt-update, and apt-upgrade on the RPi console, but nothing changed despite a good few updates being downloaded and installed. Finally I tried connecting the second drive to either of the two USB2 drives on the pi, but with the same result.

Desparate as to what to do next I checked the output of dmesg when I connect the second hard drive and this portion essentially repeats over and over again while the two external hard drives are clicking interchangeably.

The above basically carries on indefinitly until I physically disconnect the second drive, which stops the frist drive from making that same clicking sound as well.

One more piece of information which might help (but I am not sure) is that when I log into OMV6 Webconsole and go to System > Update Management > Updates I see 11 total updates pending, but clicking on the install updates button this is what I get after confirming that I want to go ahead with the update

Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Calculating upgrade...
The following packages have been kept back:
  libldb2 libwbclient0 python3-ldb python3-samba samba samba-common
  samba-common-bin samba-libs samba-vfs-modules
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 9 not upgraded.

END OF LINE

and none of the updates are downloaded and installed.

This has been driving me up the wall for the past couple of days, and no amount of searching online can land me on a specific way to fix this.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Quote from chente

Post the configuration of that rsync job please.

Never managed to get that far as I was stopped in my tracks the moment I connect the second External Hard drive. So the very beginning of the video he says connect your second hard drive, and then goes on to wipe and format it in OMV before getting to the RSYNC job. My whole setup, as explained in my post, just stops responding the moment I connect the second hard drive.

Regardless, this the command he uses in the video: rsync -av /srv/dev-disk-by-label-DATA/ /srv/dev-disk-by-label-RSYNC/

Quote from chente

Run from CLI

Will do an report back shortly.

Quote from chente

Run from CLI

I believe running that somehow broke my OMV6 install.

So I logged in remotely through SSH and ran the command and this is what I saw as the output.

It then showed me the prompt so I though it was done doing it's thing and I issued a reboot command, but now that the system is rebooted I cannot access the OMV6 Web console following the RPi IP address. All I get is a "Software Failure" message. Pressing the "left mouse button to continue" also doesn't get me anywhere now.

Weirdly enough I can no longer SSH into the pi either.

I thinks it is totally broken.

Quote from chente

Is it possible that those two hard drives have the same uuid?

I have no clue, I don't think so, but how can I check?

Quote from chente

Have you formatted the first one in OMV before connecting the second one?

Yes, I have connected the first drive to the OMV, and had it formatted before connecting the second one.

Quote from chente

Are you connecting the two drives directly to the PI?

Yes I am. Both drives are connected to the two USB3 ports on the RPi4

Quote from chente

It could be a lack of power problem. This is solved with an external adapter.

I am no professional, but I am using the official USB-C power supply for the power which has an output of 5.1V, 3.0A, 15.3W. Also, the external hard drives support no external adapter, they draw their power from the USB port.

Quote from geaves

That alone points to lack of power for both drives accessing the same USB Bus, I bet if one was plugged into a USB2 port they would be OK.

But as I mentioned in my original post, one of the things I tries was exactly that. I plugged the second hard drive into the USB2 port and the same issue still happened,

Quote from geaves

Judging by the output you have posted on pastebin I would agree

Did I do something wrong, or was it something that went wrong? and what now? do I have to start over?

Quote from chente

It's possible that it could work like that too, I agree.

Well I tried, and it did not.

Quote from chente

Yes. You have to start over. But this time follow the instructions in the guide, don't mix videos please. That way everything will be fine, that procedure is proven. Any youtube video can have errors, it happens continuously. And with more reason if you mix different procedures.

Well, I only took his general idea from the video, and did not follow through with his steps as his was done OMV5, and I wanted OMV6, hence finding and using the online guides. So basically I did follow the online guide as the primary source, and had his video as inspiration.

P.S.

I shall start over and get back to you as to how it went this time.

Quote from chente

So you need a self-powered hub in any case, if you want to connect both hard drives simultaneously. The Pi and the PI adapter do not provide enough power for the two hard drives.

I don't have one handy now, but I think I have one at work. But using a self powered hub to connect two drives to one USB port, won't that half the bandwidth I have to work with between the two?

Quote from geaves

could be a faulty Pi, but afaik they use a different bus, we need the input from

I thought as much, and as I said in the original post, one of the first things I did was swapping the RPi Board with another brand new one I had bought earlier, and from a different supplier for a different project. It showed the exact same issue as the first board.

Quote from geaves

I would say so and read through the official Pi installation you could install the 64bit RPi OS rather than the 32bit

I followed the OMV6 Installation Guide on omv-extras.org and installed the image linked in the guide which I believe to be 64Bit version. Now that I am starting over I shall be using the same guide and the same image basically.

Quote from chente

YouTube videos are fine to get a general idea of the process before you start. Understandably this can help a new user. But it is important to strictly follow the official and supported procedure in this forum. Anything else can lead to failure, as it has now.

I understand the argument, but like I said, I did follow the online, updated user-guide and things worked just fine, up until I connected the second hard drive that is. The only portion of his video playlist I was going to use was the RSYNC command, that I never even managed to get to since connecting the second drive made everything act crazy. So essentially no part of his inputs was in my original setup, and will not be in my second attempt that I am trying now.