EXT4 File System Missing after Removing Drive from Enclosure...

  • Weird situation here, but something I was surprised that didn't work and I'm hoping can be easily fixed.


    I had a file system I created inside of OMV on a USB connected external hard drive. Was working great.


    I decided I wanted to rip the drive out of the enclosure and put the bare drive into my server, connected via sata. I figured, the drive is formatted using EXT4, should detect right up.


    I was wrong.


    OMV can't find my file system anymore. It sees the physical drive but my only options seem to be to wipe it or create a new file system on it, losing all of its contents?


    Am I correct that I have no other options? Is there any way to tell OMV to just take an existing EXT4 drive it previously set up and and import it or do I need to put this back in the case, connect it via USB, and copy the files to an internal drive in order to get them off of there before I can use the drive free of the enclosure now?

  • Sort of running out of ideas here, but here's what I tried.


    I figured that starting over might be best, and since I am a newb and don't know which system files to edit to modify the file systems, figured out a new way. I decided to fresh format a new external drive with OMV (I run the system via USB) with all the SATA drives unplugged. Then, one at a time, I would plug each drive back in, and mount its file ext4 system. This seemed like a good idea when I did it with the first drive. However, after a shutdown, connecting of the second drive, and a reboot, I had MAJOR issues, and all kinds of I/O errors on the drive that OMV noticed and the system eventually just stopped booting (coincidentally, removing all the SATA drive data cables and rebooting worked like a charm, so OMV was really hating trying to mount that second drive).


    Mind you, if I boot the system with a Debian rescue CD, both hard drives are connected and they are showing up just fine.


    Is there a way that openmediavault can even do this, or am I barking up the wrong tree? My assumption is that I can just manually add existing ext4 drives to a new OMV installation, one at a time, without having to destroy the data on the drives. Am I mistaken? Is the only way to add a new drive to OMV to connect and initialize/destroy it, and then copy content over to it?

  • I'll answer my own questions here in the hopes it helps others.


    Not at all sure why the system was freaking at my drives, it might have been because they were previously mounted on the backports kernel. After installing the backports kernel, and one at a time adding each disk, I was set. It helped that I found the .cfg file I needed to edit to manually remove the old file system entries too. Big help. Using nano to remove them was the way to go, via ssh.


    On to my other issue, the external USB drive. It seems that OMV, once you initialize a disk as an external USB drive, expects it to always be that way. It flat out refused to read the bare drive until I put it back in the enclosure. So, I'm manually copying files to another internal drive from the external so I can free myself from that tether. Lesson learned. Not sure if it is even fixable or not, but for anyone who plans to temporarily use an external USB connected device and then gut the drive for internal, don't.


    Things seem pretty stable now. Now I just need to figure out if I need to install any of the firmwares listed on the updates screen from tbe backports kernel...Does it hurt to install all that stuff even if you don't use it or should I just ignore it? I don't see a firmware for my Qualcomm Atheros ethernet anywhere and it's still not functioning so maybe I'll just leave my PCIE card in long term.


    Thanks all.

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