USB power issue

[chunksin]

Hi all,

I'm having a bit of a nightmare trying to get an external hard drive to work. I have the ultimate mister case and USB board and cannot get an external hard disk to work with it. I have tried a portable 2.5 inch drive and that obviously wasn't getting enough power so I bought a 1TB portable 3.5 inch drive with a 12v power supply and it still won't work.

The board can power an 8BitDo brick adaptor for my controllers and a usb network adaptor, they work fine although I have noticed that only the end port (opposite to the main power input) lights up green when I insert a USB device. I've formatted as NTFS and created the correct structure but it doesn't work and I strongly suspect a lack of power to the board.

The PSU I am using for the Mister is a 5v 30w supply so that should be more than adequate - does it sound like a USB board issue?

My next step is to purchase an externally powered USB hub but I thought that's basically what the USB board is so not convinced that will solve my problem ...

[chunksin]

Done some more troubleshooting, I get a green light on usb1, an orange light on usb5-usb7 but no lights on usb2 and usb3 yet the ports seem to work, very odd. I might reflow all solder joints just in case there's a dodgy connection somewhere.

[Sigismond0]

Doesn't the UltimateMister board have some funny fork/pin to pull power from the DE-10 power socket, rather than just having its own? Maybe that's not making good contact?

[chunksin]

It does, yes, I made sure contact was good and removed some of the oxidation on the pin it makes contact with, reflowed the solder on the power pins and still the same. Next thing to try is to eliminate the PSU as the issue. The frustrating thing is I can see the drive spin up and if you try Switch to USB in the Mister menu it shows the free space on the disk correctly, I then connected via FTP and tried to navigate to /media/usb0 and it hangs my FTP browser!

[rickdangerous]

I’ve sent you a PM

[rickdangerous]

Copy the files from SDCard to HDD and test. Here is working fine.

[chunksin]

I've enabled SSH using the script, used Putty to connect and I can see the device using 'lsusb -v' and can browse the disk from the command line fine, could it be a permissions issue? These are the existing permissions, odd I can't get to the usb0 folder via FTP or from the Mister interface, it would point at a Linux issue rather than hardware.

lsusb output:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1840:13fd
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 2.10
bDeviceClass 0
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 64
idVendor 0x1840
idProduct 0x13fd
bcdDevice 81.02
iManufacturer 1 Elements
iProduct 2 USB device
iSerial 3 ABC12345678988

ls -l output:

/media# ls -l
total 176
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 131072 Jan 1 1970 fat
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Apr 29 10:30 rootfs
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 40960 May 29 10:57 usb0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Apr 25 18:50 usb1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Apr 25 18:50 usb2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Apr 25 18:50 usb3
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Apr 25 18:50 usb4
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Apr 25 18:50 usb5
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Apr 25 18:50 usb6
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Apr 25 18:50 usb7

[chunksin]

Forgot to add the directory listing if that helps:

/media# cd usb0
/media/usb0# ls -l
total 46285302
-rw-rw-rw- 2 root plugdev 1858076672 Mar 13 2018 2018-03-13-raspbian-stretch-lite.img
-rw-rw-rw- 2 root plugdev 4381390772 Mar 2 2018 ArPiCadeFixup5.2.img.7z
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 0 Oct 12 2018 'Attract Images'
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 4096 Apr 2 2019 Backup
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 4096 Nov 17 2019 Backup_20191117_1451
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 4096 Oct 30 2018 BIOSZIP
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 8192 Oct 11 2012 Boot
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 398156 Jul 26 2012 bootmgr
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 1 Jul 10 2015 BOOTNXT
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 8192 Oct 10 2012 BOOTSECT.BAK
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 0 Jul 5 2018 ChaosCode
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 0 Oct 16 2018 clrmamepro
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 0 May 29 08:31 config
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 0 Aug 6 2019 danny
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 8192 Apr 3 2019 DAPHNE
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 0 Dec 28 13:46 DESKTOP-DKN8JM3
lrwxrwxrwx 2 root plugdev 60 Jul 10 2015 'Documents and Settings' -> /media/usb0/Users
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 20480 May 13 2019 Driving
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 4096 Apr 14 2019 FoodFight
-rw-rw-rw- 2 root plugdev 7910457344 Apr 14 2019 FoodFight.img
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 0 Oct 26 2018 found.000
drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 0 Jun 4 11:08 Games

[rickdangerous]

What format you using? If you prefer contact me directly via chat to be faster.

[KnC]

i have had a quick read so i may have missed you already trying
But i could never get to the usb hdd with it formatted as ntfs using ftp
as soon as i used a exfat formatted hdd it showed in ftp fine

[chunksin]

Some progress I rebuilt a new 8GB SD card using the older installer package release_20200122 and a bare bones of cores etc. and managed to get the TGFX16 core to see the disk so it looks like a config issue somewhere, now doing a full rebuild and upgrade, see if that fixes it. Thanks to you both for your input - interesting you haven't got NTFS to work over FTP either KnC, that's one less thing to poke at!

[Threepwood]

drw-rw-rw- 1 root plugdev 0 Jun 4 11:08 Games

Try writing it lowercase "games". With NTFS MiSTer seems case sensitive on external USB drives. See here: viewtopic.php?p=1058#p1058

[tRAcE]

Try writing it lowercase "games". With NTFS MiSTer seems case sensitive on external USB drives.

Valid point - on case sensitive filesystems (ext4, NTFS etc) the pathes and the filenames will be case sensitive on the MiSTer, too.

To safe me some hassle, I only use exFat at the moment, this is case insensitive.

I think that's why the original installer also creates an exFat volume on your SD card.

[chunksin]

You are both spot on, I was testing with 2 drives, I formatted one with just a folder called 'games' and that was the one that worked, tried the other one and it fails! Thanks everyone for your help with this, very much appreciated, saved my sanity and a few quid I would have spent next on a new PSU and external USB hub!

[rickdangerous]

Yes, that’s why I’m asking. Ntfs is to avoid. I sugest to start backup the SDCard to hd and test first.

Glad all ok.
Keep safe, Enjoy MiSTer