excellent! Many thanks! You should consider putting it on the downloads section of the web site - with modern CAD packages and 3D printers, there must be others that will benefit from it!
Dear Western Digital Support,
I have just finished setting up each of the “project areas” using the included WD PiDrive 375gb Foundation Edition - English software and upon the last reboot there was a boot failure due to file system corruption on the WD PiDrive media. This failure resulted in just “4 RASPBERRY IMAGES” being displayed no matter with area was selected. The product that I was working with is the:
WD PiDrive Compute Centre with RPI3, 376gb USB drive, power splitter cable, wireless mouse and keyboard…
I did notice the Lightning Bolt icon as mentioned in another POST, but I thought it indicated a Temp issue and not a power drain issue. I was going to install a heat sink on the Pi, but this corruption occurred. I am using 3A power supply that came with kit as well as cables.
There was issue with file system corruption (possibly each /boot) when SD “project area” selection was chosen and :
Projects Spaces replaces the need for multiple SD cards to manage different projects for your Raspberry Pi. A “Project Space” is a vanilla install of Raspbian Jessie Lite that can be used to test code or create different projects in their own isolated environments. This prevents elements of your separate projects to conflict with each other across Project Spaces. Each space has its own /boot and /root partition…
I do not know if there is an issue with the actual PiDrive itself or with the SD boot selection:
Since I can not access the WD PiDrive using a standard Raspian SD boot media, I am unable to determine which /boot files are corrupted…none of the separate Project areas will successfully boot.
I am attempting to reinitialize and recreate each “Project area” again…but also have noticed that over 300gb of the drive is not used and is unavailable… the boot berry SD has preconfigured project areas, 2 x 8gb, 2 x 16gb, 1x 32gb…The Main Raspbian area is ?.. nonetheless >300gb is LOST…
Hi, sorry for your trouble. Please send me your shipping info (including phone number) so I can ship out a new 375GB drive and preloaded SDcard today in-parallel with trying to debug what you have now. My email is dave.chew@wdc.com
Just to check a couple of things:
Are you using the USB power cable that came with the Compute Centre kit (cable between 5V adapter and PiDrive cable)?
When you did the SW installation did you have Ethernet disconnected and WiFi not connected?
How did your second attempt at SW installation go?
Regarding partition size for the OSes, Project Spaces 1-5 have fixed capacity as you note. Raspbian and Raspbian Lite are set to maximize their partition size based on remaining available space. If neither are installed, then the space is not used. In this case you could access the remaining space, but would need to use fdisk or gparted within a Project Space to set up the partition, then mkfs, mount, edit fstab and set permissions. If both Raspbian and Raspbian Lite are installed, they will split the remaining available space.
The partition sizes are programmed in the NOOBS system via a file called “partitions.json”. Each OS has a partitions.json file. See screenshots below of this file for Raspbian and Raspbian Lite as programmed in Foundation Edition. The last line in each file sets the partition to fixed or maximized. For Project Spaces 1-5, this line is “want_maximized”: false.
Our Foundation Edition software is NOOBS with modifications to present multiple instances of Raspbian Lite as “Project Spaces”. There’s a lot of useful info about NOOBS here:
GitHub - raspberrypi/noobs: NOOBS (New Out Of Box Software) - An easy Operating System install manager for the Raspberry Pi
Thanks.
Hi dave Thanks for fast response. I can’t remember whether the ethernet was connected during 1st boot or not. but during initial “imaging of structure” it must have been because I know I started “after initial layout” with setup of the 1st Raspbian OS setup using raspi-config to set my localization and wifi before the update and upgrade using the ethernet. Once these connections, config’s were done… I moved to 32gb Raspbian Lite space to test/see its setup and optimization again with both wifi and ethernet. Once I got that “space” configured I was able to reduce my setup times for the other “spaces”…it wasn’t until “space 1” was completely configured and connected for its final update/upgrade was complete that all went downhill.
I am using all cables and power supply that came with my kit.
My 2nd attempt last night, only utilized wifi for the Raspbian OS, but only did initial “localizations” for each of the other spaces and Wifi for the OSMC that I also selected.
somewhere I also read last night about be limited to 5 OS’s being configured… I am confused here… but
I will look into this noobs partitions.jsonfiles on the noobs SD tonight as well… now that I defined ALL the spaces"…
I sent you my contact info earlier as well as I was interested in the touchscreen usb case
james martel
[Deleted-Privacy]
USA
[Deleted-Privacy]
Order Number: [Deleted-Privacy]
Order Date: April 23, 2017
Hi Thanks David,
I am using ALL power and USB cables that came with the Compute Center KIT. I did have Ethernet connected the 1st attempt until I had Wifi configured and had performed all localizations and initial reboot, update and upgrade. I 1st setup the top Raspbian OS and then the last Raspbian Lite entry (not space 5). After performing, customization of this “Lite” distribution to include a “Pixel Desktop” I had moved to each of the project spaces and performed same “Lite Desktop” customization steps one space at a time starting with 5-32gb,4-16gb, 3-16gb,2-8gb and then space 1-8gb. It was only after, performing the the last reboot in space 1 that all went amiss. It was at that point, I did encounter the Lightning Bolt on the screen and then the update completed without errors. I then performed the “sudo reboot” from the terminal and only 4 raspberries appeared on the screen for each of the OS’s and spaces being selected. I believe my kit has the 5V 3A power supply as well. I had assumed that the Main partition info file “partition.json?” located on the WD375gb drive had become corrupted because the SD card menu for selection still functioned and allowed the further reboot and selection of the desired /boot area?
You indicate that Raspbian and raspbian Lite maximize remaining space so if 80gb is used for the “spaces” and there’s a 20gb shared DATA area, then each of those OS should have been sized at >100gb each…
My 2nd attempt at the build, appeared to create all “spaces” and entries as before, but I also selected (unknowingly) to also install OMBC and another OS “that failed to connect and download its files”…I did that during the PiDrive allocation screens that 21000? mb of data was copied…that 100000?mb was required…and still 300000? was initially available. I did some reading on WDLabs forum that indicated that only 5 OS’s could be installed per drive… I don’t have my notes with me but I remember trying to resize the “space partitions” but the raspi-config did not understand the SDA’s… I believe SDA5 through SDA9 were used.
I am trying to understand where these partition.json files are located… are they on the Foundation Noobs SD or do they exist in hidden areas for each on the PiDrive. I could not see any other “space” info from within Raspbian or Raspbian Lite but for some reason I feel that the OMBC did see those areas but since I have never used OMBC I was not sure what I was looking at.
I know about gparted but have not used it previously on any of my Raspi Robots SD cards. I have not investigated FDISK or Windows 7/10 access to these PiDrives either and only used them for SD card imaging and backup. I also only have limited exposure to your PiDrive offerings that I have recently began experimenting with to create a network media share offering… I have yet to utilize the zeronode offering…
I will attempt to install gparted on the main Raspbian space and will investigate the PiDrive layout
Thanks again,
Jim Martel
[Deleted-Privacy]
USA
[Deleted-Privacy]
