Node N132 can't see music on new external usb hard drive
Answered
I had a problem and resolved it, so I wanted to post this in case anyone else experiences it.
I bought the new node n132 and attached a new external USB hard drive to it with all my music and the hard drive was formatted as NTFS. I configured/enabled the "Server Mode" feature per the instructions, but the BlueOS app would not display My Library and therefore the hard drive and its music.
I called support and they were good in terms of diagnosing the cause of the problem but didn't know how to solve the problem. They looked at log files for my system and realized that my music was on a secondary partition on the hard drive but their software is coded to only look for music on the primary partition. So the node/BlueOS couldn't see my music even though it was on the hard drive.
Support was unable to advise why my hard drive had this extra partition. They thought it was maybe something the hard drive manufacturer added for support reasons, etc. Support suggested I go buy a different brand of hard drive to see if it would work better with the node.
I wasn't about to go buying other hard drives "hoping" that one would work.
After I hung up with support, the whole multiple partition thing dawned on me and it had nothing to do with the brand of hard drive, it was how I set it up. When I unboxed the new hard drive, I initially connected it to my Windows 11 laptop and using disk manager it asks you to initialize the disk using either GPT Guid Partition Table or MBR Master Boot Record, and you must select one before then formatting the drive as a certain format such as NTFS (or FAT32, etc.). Well, I chose GPT because that is the more modern solution and has benefits over MBR. However, that is where the problem was caused because GPT creates an extra partition that BlueOS can't correctly account for.
So in the end, resolution to my problem was reconfiguring my hard drive to use MBR with NTFS because MBR doesn't create the extra problematic partition that GPT does. Once I did that, the Node/BlueOS saw and played my music without issue.
Warning, you can't simply change your drive from GPT to MBR without deleting everything on the hard drive. So you will need your music saved to another location first so that after you convert from GPT to MBR and format it, that you can copy your music back onto the external hard drive.
Anyways, MBR is old technology and has its own drawbacks. The biggest one is that it only supports up to 2TB drives. My drive was that size so it worked fine in my case but that might not be the same for everyone. Ultimately, I think the developers need to change the code to account for music being on different partitions so people can use GPT, but that is a whole other conversation.
So like I said, I wanted to post this just in case it helps someone else out in the future since support was unaware of how to resolve the issue when I called them.
-
Not 100% sure of this but it seems Windows has created a sort of "reserved" partition for restoring purposes if GPT is chosen as patition table.
If you could format the disk on a linux computer, you could use modern GPT without this extra partition nonsense.
It should be safe to delete this extra partition and grow the remaining partition to cover the full disk.
0 -
That is right, Windows creates a small "Microsoft Reserved partition" on GPT disks. Once read somewhere it is used for bitlocker encryption, not sure if correct.
Linux would be one way, the graphical tool GParted is very nice and intuitive, gives you more control over what you are doing than Window's Disk Manager. No need to install Linux, you can run it from a "live USB stick" as well.
In Windows you can get rid of it using the command line tool diskpart. Be very careful to select the correct disk, or you might be deleting a partition on the PC's built in disk.
Would always choose GPT and use one of the mentioned tools.
0
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
2 comments