This post was covers installing an external USB hard drive to a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ running Raspbian Stretch Lite.
Firstly, I had terrible trouble getting my Seagate Expansion 2 TB USB 3.0 Desktop 3.5 Inch External Hard Drive to work correctly. Endless permission issues, problems with Samba, you name it.
The key to solving these issues was to install the NTFS-3G driver rather than using the standard NTFS driver when mounting the drive. I’ll cover that as I go in the steps described below.
Step 1
I started with the Raspberry Pi shutdown and simply attached the drive to a vacant USB port on the Pi. I the powered up the drive and then the Pi.
Step 2
SSH to the Raspberry Pi as usual. I then ran the following command to see what drives were now attached.
sudo blkid
I looked for the new Seagate drive which in this case was /dev/sda2. I made a note of the information, especially the UUID which I used later.
Step 3
So, I’m skipping all the trial and error here but the next significant thing to do is install the NTFS-3G driver using apt-get.
sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g
Step 4
Time to mount the drive on the file system. I chose to mount the drive under /media rather than /mnt or any other location. So, I created a folder specifically for the drive (/media/seagateHDD) then mounted the drive to that folder.
cd /media
mkdir seagateHDD
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /media/seagateHDD/ -t ntfs-3g
NB: Note the use of the –t ntfs-3g option.
This proved the drive could be mounted and that it worked. As you can see permissions are wide open.
Step 5
Now we need to set up the system to reconnect the drive at start-up. For this I modified the fstab file.
sudo nano /etc/fstab
And added the following line. Note the use of the UUID rather than /dev/sda2. This helps to ensure the same drive gets reattached just in case the device changes.
UUID=FC82A10F82A0D006 /media/seagateHDD ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
Step 6
Time to install Samba. Firstly I installed Samba using apt-get.
sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin
When that was done I edited the samba configuration file.
sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf
And added the following section.
[media]
writeable = yes
public = yes
directory mode = 0777
path = /media/seagateHDD/Media
comment = Pi shared media folder
create mode = 0777
Note that there was an existing folder called Media on the drive. I chose to make that folder accessible via Samba.
The a quick restart of Samba to read the new configuration.
sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart
Step 7
Test from Windows. I just added a Media Location mapped to my Raspberry Pi’s IP address and the media share and that was it!