NASLite Network Attached Storage

Since NASLite will not format my 160gb WD drive, I went out and bought a 200gb Seagate drive. Before I begin this journey, can I take the drive out of the box and just install it in NASlite, or must some "conditioning" take place before installation?
Thanks.

Hi,

Set the jumper to either Master or Slave, then install the drive and format it in Naslite+

Eden

I installed a new 320 gig WD straight out of the box into NASlite without any hassle at all. Apart from making sure the jumpers are set correctly. couldnt have been easier.

Eden ... thanks for the reply. The Seagate 200gb drive formatted fine and fills out the server's 4th drive. I am still puzzled why the Westerd Digital 160gb drive could/would not format.
Thank you.

Did you use any third party tools on the HD?

you could try using Fdisk on it and removing the partitions.

Eden

Eden: First I put the WD HDD fresh from my WXP PC into NASlite and tried to let NASLite format it (1st failure), then I formatted the drive using Windows XP (twice), then I used Paragon Drive Manager to fdisk/format it as Ext2 ... that worked in NASlite until I rebooted, then NASLite rejected the disk again. Then I tried IDE-0, then IDE-1 (Master / Slave) ... then I gave up and bought the Seagate.

Grumpa:

I think you might have gotten close with the 160GB. If the steps you performed were as described in that sequence the only thing missing may have been an additional "Configure Disks" in NASLite+.

If you still want to try to fix this with the 160GB ... do the Ext2 format in Paragon, install in NASLite+ box and boot. Let it recognize the drive and immediately "Configure Storage Disks". I think the format with Paragon created a recognizable Linux partition, but the partition was not quite properly labelled ("Disk-1" etc).

Hope this helps ... let us know.
Georg

Georg: As always, thank you for the help. This is the final saga of the mysterious 160gb WD drive. NASLite hates it. I re-formatted it (Ext2) using Paragon, then thought better and did a "KillDisk" and wrote zeros on the whole disk. Back to Ext2 with Paragon. Into NASLite - by itself - initially NASLite "accepts it". Then when I go to configue it ... the dreaded endless rolling messages pour out, like I have posted before. Hard power down, back to Windows NTFS format, now happily an external USB drive (that I don't really need). BTW is there any way to safely get out of these "rolling messages" w/o a "power down" - NASLite reports it must "fix" the file system before it mounts a drive. Telnet "reboot" and "shutdown" are ignored ... and that is the extent of my Linux experience. (Windows Geek). Thanks again.

You WD 160G drive is behaving strangely. Perhaps a call to WD is in order. There is a possibility of a firmware upgrade for that drive.

At any rate, it shouldn’t be acting up like that.

Afterthought: Did you try formatting that drive via NASlite on another machine?

I don't know if this is the case with NasLite, but I've seen some other Linux/Motherboard/WD Hard drive incompatibilities before.

For example in KnoppMyth (a linuxPersonal Video Recorder based on Debian) several people had conniptions trying to get it to work with WD drives.

In the end, it turned out that it would only work if the WD drive was jumpered to Cable Select. I wonder if that might solve Grumpa's problem here. Perhaps he can try it and report back.

I had a 80gig WD drive that had problems every few months with Windoze to the point that it would need to be re-formatted and reloaded. I put the same drive in a Redhat box and never had 1 problem and I am still using the same drive in the Naslite+ box along with a 120gig WD and a 40gig Maxtor. There are just some drives with strange issues.