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[Q] external drive

there is a usb hookup.. so the question is raised, in my mind, can you hook up an external hard drive and thus rendering the 13gb a non issue (at least in the area of video/audio files).
anyone had experience with this?

I've been able to use my flash usb thumb drives without any problems, however when I plugged my WD 1Tb storage drive into the GTab, used ES File explorer to open usbdisk folder but did not see any files listed.

If you want to use a external usb hard drive for movies/files it has to be formated fat32 and it will work.

I have connected with 16gb, 32gb, 64gb and a 500gb Western Digital HD (usb powered). All work fine, but best to NOT remove the USB until the G is placed in sleep mode. There appears to be an unmounting issue that also blows up the app index. Apps can vanish and then not appear again until rebooting.
Archos 101 seems to have a similar issue, so maybe Froyo related.

rushless said:
I have connected with 16gb, 32gb, 64gb and a 500gb Western Digital HD (usb powered). All work fine, but best to NOT remove the USB until the G is placed in sleep mode. There appears to be an unmounting issue that also blows up the app index. Apps can vanish and then not appear again until rebooting.
Archos 101 seems to have a similar issue, so maybe Froyo related.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, I try to put mine to sleep before I pull out my thumb drive as well, but sometimes I forget and as soon as I yank it, the tablet reboots. Ugh!

I bought a 500gb Seagate the same night I got my tablet (been needing a portable hd for a while). It wouldn't work on either the tablet or my PS3. Definitely a format thing. As mentioned earlier, it needs to be formatted Fat32.
Just an FYI, formatting a big hd to Fat32 isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. Windows 7 won't do Fat32 and 95 has a size limit (32 gb maybe?). HP has a program you get download from their site. It works on any make, not just their's. If anyone needs it, I still have it on my PC at home.

J_Bone said:
I bought a 500gb Seagate the same night I got my tablet (been needing a portable hd for a while). It wouldn't work on either the tablet or my PS3. Definitely a format thing. As mentioned earlier, it needs to be formatted Fat32.
Just an FYI, formatting a big hd to Fat32 isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. Windows 7 won't do Fat32 and 95 has a size limit (32 gb maybe?). HP has a program you get download from their site. It works on any make, not just their's. If anyone needs it, I still have it on my PC at home.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What is the app called? Work with Vista? I tried formatting a 1gb HD to Fat32 via DOS commands, but failed.
As far as USB, main issue for removing while G is asleep (besides random reboots) is that removing while awake seems to be a main reason apps vanish until a reboot.

If I need to format a big, big hard drive to FAT32, I'll boot up a Linux LiveCD (usually Ubuntu or Knoppix) and use gParted to do it.

rushless said:
What is the app called? Work with Vista? I tried formatting a 1gb HD to Fat32 via DOS commands, but failed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is a different site but I think it is the same program. One of the comments said it didn't work on Vista business but YMMV. Worth a try.
http://hp-usb-disk-storage-format-tool.software.informer.com/
I went and checked my reformatted portable drive a few minutes ago and the tablet doesn't recognize it. It actually says there are no files in that directory. The drive is working on my pc and PS3. I put a small 4 gb stick in the tablet and it read it fine.
Any ideas?

It recognized my Ipod 120GB classic in disk mode. It also appears to be hot swappedable.

papote18 said:
It recognized my Ipod 120GB classic in disk mode. It also appears to be hot swappedable.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is hardware wise. Software wise, depending on ROM, it can crash your tablet. I try to put it to sleep before pulling my flash drive out. If not, sometimes it will go black and I'll see the boot animation.

I went to the link above looking for the Fat32 > 32 gig tool and it was not available.
If you need this tool, Google for "HP SP27608" and there are a few places where you can download it. HP didn't even have it on their FTP server -- don't know why they have quit offering it?!
Rev

Hi,
Sorry for the late post, but I just got around to trying a bunch of my USB flash drives, and Gtab doesn't see any of them ...
The LED on the drives flashes for a second, then goes off.
Do I have to mount it or something?
Jim

same problem here too. Is there a way to mount a USB drive without formatting? I do not want to loose my collection.

I've never had an issue with my Flash drives (VEGAn or TnT Lite). Are the drives formatted to FAT32?

I have had an issue with a 32GB USB flash drive not showing up on the gtab. I plugged it into my win7. Machine, moved files off, formatted fat, put files back on and it worked fine in the tab.
Another note, using vegan, I never sleep the device to get the drive out. Just wait a second and Yank it. Never been an issue for me.

I have noticed that my flash drives don't mount 100% of the time and sometimes require dis/reconnecting. Also I have a 1tb wd my passport. I formatted the whole drive fat32 and the gtab wouldn't see it. I then formatted just a partition of 120gb in fat32.....still no dice. I then reduced the partition to 32gb nd the gtab sees/reads/writes no problem.
I'm wondering how that other Guy got his 500gb to mount....

I'd like to know how folks have been able to get their external hard drives recognized as well. I have tried stock and tnt lite roms. Also tried several different hard disks all formated fat32. Even repartioned disks to 8GB and still no joy. Flash drives I own all work OK. Just can't use hard disk as yet. Even tried new rom image that came out today, no luck. Am I missing or not doing something?

The usb port does not supply enough power for external hard drives. I tried several and they did not show up in dmesg. When I used one with external power, the drive was seen and the partitions, but was not mounted.

The usb port does not supply enough power for external hard drives. I tried several and they did not show up in dmesg. When I used one with external power, the drive was seen and the partitions, but was not mounted.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, but 2 out of 3 drives I tried use ext power. still no work.
Can anyone who has this working please post what drive they are using?

SD"2" Mount Issue

My first thread that I can call my own.
Question for you all. Is there an easier way to transfer files over the the GTAB then having to pop out the SD Card and put it into an adapter and then into the computer and then out of the computer, out of the adapter and back in the GTAB?
Because every time I mount the USB, it only mounts the "internal" SD Card. Is there some sort of way to get it to mount both the internal and external SD Card?
I hate messing with the external SD Card. All the "popping in and out" makes me nervous.
I even tried mounting the internal SD Card and then copying the movies/music/etc.. over to the external SD Card via a file manager... but that is DAMNNNNN slow.

I haven't found a way (yet). Given that neither the zPad or TnT stock builds work, I'm thinking it's not that easy to do. Drives me nuts as well because I really don't want to keep taking the card out over and over and potentially damage it, over time.

That's exactly what I am worried about. LOL
I can just picture not paying 100% attention and snapping the card in half or, breaking the "locking" mechanism that holds the card in place.
roebeet said:
I haven't found a way (yet). Given that neither the zPad or TnT stock builds work, I'm thinking it's not that easy to do. Drives me nuts as well because I really don't want to keep taking the card out over and over and potentially damage it, over time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

If you have ADB, can you do adb pull or push?
Jim

My workaround has been to use the LAN tab in ES File Explorer to copy data wirelessly to sdcard2. Probably not the speediest method but it keeps the card in place.

The techie/hacker solution to easy file transfer is to use the Rsync for Android app in the market store. Once you have it setup, (not the easiest thing to do) it works great for moving files automated from your gtab back to an rsync server (my linux box to the rescue). I even have a secondary profile to get it to reverse rsync a specified directory FROM my linux box to my gtab. Presto -- easy file transfer via wifi!!!

Also, another idea might be to use Dropbox?
Jim

P0RT3R said:
My workaround has been to use the LAN tab in ES File Explorer to copy data wirelessly to sdcard2. Probably not the speediest method but it keeps the card in place.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I do the same thing. It's mighty slow, but it works.

roebeet - an idea that almost worked - maybe you know why?
roebeet said:
I haven't found a way (yet). Given that neither the zPad or TnT stock builds work, I'm thinking it's not that easy to do. Drives me nuts as well because I really don't want to keep taking the card out over and over and potentially damage it, over time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi,
You all got me curious, so I just tried the following:
- Created a dir under /mnt/sdcard, /mnt/sdcard/mymnt
- Get temp root (z4root)
- Start terminal
- su
- mount -t vfat /dev/block/vold/179:17 /mnt/sdcard/mymnt
At this point, I can access the sdcard2 by using /mnt/sdcard/mymnt or simply /sdcard/mymnt.
So, I disabled USB debugging, and I get the popup asking if I want to activate USB transfer (I'm on 3452, on earlier TNT firmware, it use to say enable USB storage).
I click the button to Activate, and then another window pops up, and I click Activate.
Then, the popup just stays there, with the spinning thing. It never enables USB transfer, and, on my PC, I see the removable drive, but when I click on it, it says it's not ready.
I've also tried umounting /mnt/sdcard2, thinking that it might be confused because of the two mounts to /dev/block/vold/179:17, but it still does the same thing.
So:
- It looks like I can mount the /dev/block/vold/179:17 (the external microSD card) under /mnt/sdcard, and
- When I do that mount, I can see the contents of the external microSD card in terminal under /mnt/sdcard/mymnt and under /sdcard/mymnt, but
- For some reason, turning off USB debugging/activatiing USB transfer fails.
Maybe someone can figure out why activating the USB transfer fails. If we can figure that out, then that would allow seeing the external microSD card via the PC USB interface.
Jim

I think it would need to mount both volumes -- the internal SDcard and the external SDCARD2 -- separately...
Using a mount (reparse) works internally since they are on the same device -- but if you try to mount SDCARD externally it doesn't understand the reference to SDCARD2
My phone actually mounts to the computer as two drives -- one for internal (SDCARD) and the other for external (SDCARD2)
I'd assume there is a way to have something similar work on our gTablets...
I'll have to slap a spare microSD card into the tablet to try though...wondering if teh INF needs to be tweaked as well (??)

From what Ive seen or experienced, Cyanogen was the only rom that Had the Sd card and Sd card2 Thing fixed right (with exception of having to plug in the Power cord before mounting). Evrey other Rom seems to have problems. But Cyanogen has way too many other problems so I use Vegan since to me it seems the most stable :s

Yeah -- my phone is running a fork from Cyanogenmod 6...so the code is shared

TeutonicWolf said:
I think it would need to mount both volumes -- the internal SDcard and the external SDCARD2 -- separately...
Using a mount (reparse) works internally since they are on the same device -- but if you try to mount SDCARD externally it doesn't understand the reference to SDCARD2
My phone actually mounts to the computer as two drives -- one for internal (SDCARD) and the other for external (SDCARD2)
I'd assume there is a way to have something similar work on our gTablets...
I'll have to slap a spare microSD card into the tablet to try though...wondering if teh INF needs to be tweaked as well (??)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's the problem... When the Gtab is plugged into the PC USB (while USB debug is disabled), only one new "drive" appears, corresponding to /sdcard on the Gtab. There is no 2nd drive appearing on the PC corresponding to /sdcard2 on the Gtab.
I've been looking at my Windows configuration, with the Gtab plugged in, and the one drive that appears shows up under "Portable Devices" branch in Device Manager. The properties show that it corresponds to "wpdfs.inf", and looking through that, it looks like a generic USB Mass Storage configuration, i.e., a USB drive.
I still think that something would need to be fixed on the Gtab end for the two drives to appear on the Windows end.
Jim

app fix
I have found a workaround for the issue with the installation of a single app:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=12299831&postcount=2

Depending on what you want to do, an FTP solution is also possible as discussed in this thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=869844
By using swiFTP, I am able to open a connection through a Win7 windows explorer, and I can drag-and-drop files to SDCARD2 (over a wireless connection). I put a 1Gig movie on the card and it took about 12 minutes.

Another option is to use Multi Mount SD-Card. This is link is for the lite version, there is also a paid version.
This app works outside the embedded SD Card Mounting scheme that comes with Froyo.
With this you dont have to press the "Mount USB" button that comes up in the notification bar when you attach the USB cable. Instead it will auto-mount the either the internal or the external SD Card when you plug in the cable.
(Having configured the setting of your choice before hand).
Unfortunately it can not mount both at the same time.
It works with my GTAB and I'm using VEGAn 5.1 Beta.
(Without the 5.1.1 Suppliment patch)

Folks are still struggling with this?
Use a USB flash drive, I do it all the time. Just a regular, boring, Windows FAT-formatted flash drive.

Wow it is amazing that this problem still exists.
I am a new owner of a Gtab and have had it for less than 2 days. Thank goodness for the many informative posts on this site, that have helped me make my new toy almost perfect.
I updated to 3588, installed cwm and titanbackup, vegan5.1.1 including the suppl patch and even learned how to tether it to my Samsung Captivate. The one thing that was annoying me was my device not seeing the 16 gb microsd card that I had inserted both in the gtab and on my pc.
After reading this thread, it looks like I am not going crazy, but it seems like my device is destined to not acknowledge this addtional storage in it's settings?
I really was hoping to use the external card for videos and my mp3 collection, so I am missing something or did I do something wrong to make this happen?
I would appreciate any comments or suggestions since this is the only thing that I need to get squared away before I install more apps(with the possibility and ever present threat of having to re-install something I may have already done)
I could not post this question in the dev section since I do not have enough posts to allow me to.
Thanks
Tina

Regular USB port on my gTab. what is it for?

I am trying to figure out what the usb port is for. I've tried to plug in my flash drive to it to view movies that way, no luck. any ideas.

USB drives, both flash and harddrives, have been reported to work. They have to be formatted FAT32.
Jim

Also supports keyboards and mice.

shuratilt said:
I am trying to figure out what the usb port is for. I've tried to plug in my flash drive to it to view movies that way, no luck. any ideas.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's funny...I watch movies from my flash drive on my GTab all the time....try rebooting.

It is likely working but you have to know where to look to see it. In a file manager you need to navigate to the / folder. That is the root directory. From there you should be able to scroll down until you see usbdisk. That will be your thumbdrive. I'm not sure that external mice and keyboards work with TnT. TnT doesn't have the mouse cursor built in I don't think. They work fine with vegaN that I use though. You can also use external hard drives as long as they are formatted fat32 and not NTFS.

[Q] External HDD?

Hi,
I was thinking of buying an external hdd to connect to my TF, however, try as I might, I can't find anywhere that confirms that it will work. I don't want to shell out for one and have to send it back if not.
Thanks in advance.

kingronnie said:
Hi,
I was thinking of buying an external hdd to connect to my TF, however, try as I might, I can't find anywhere that confirms that it will work. I don't want to shell out for one and have to send it back if not.
Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I can plug my portable USB hard-drive directly into either of the USB ports on the dock and it works fine. It appears in the notifications area as a hard-disk icon. Clicking on this shows me all the files on the drive. I was able to start watching an mp4 video from the HDD, although I didn't watch it all the way through.

That's great news
Just out of interest, did you format it using the TF, or was it pre-formatted? If so, are you using FAT32 or NTFS?
Sorry for the barrage of questions!

kingronnie said:
Hi,
I was thinking of buying an external hdd to connect to my TF, however, try as I might, I can't find anywhere that confirms that it will work. I don't want to shell out for one and have to send it back if not.
Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
A quick search for HDD shows the following:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1067975&highlight=hdd

Thanks. I'd searched for Hard Disc.
Sorry to be a pain.

interestingly though, honeycomb doesn't automatically mount the external harddrive unless it's fat32 or NTFS. No idea why this is the case as ext 2/3 are clearly supported.
Regardless, I was able to manually mount my external HDD once I found out where the device was.
Is anybody familiar with the auto mounting scripts enough to know offhand where you would look to add ext support? My knowledge of this kind of thing ends with fstab unfortunately and I don't know too much about how honeycomb works yet as I just got my transformer yesterday night.

Both NTFS and FAT32 are supported.
I was really glad NTFS is supported out of the box.
I use both Toshiba portable HDD and WD portable HDD and have no problem.

Just to update, I bought a 250G Seagate laptop drive and put it in a caddy, hooked it up and it worked and mounted first time

[Q] Help!! Connecting External Hard Drives

I have two Hard drives, one is a 320Gb (Portable Seagate momentus) which I successfully formatted to exFAT and can access & copy files back and forth through my OTG cable to the S5. It mounts perfectly as USBDRIVEA without the need for paragon NTFS+exFAT.
My second hard drive however is a different story together, I'm quite new to Android though I pull a brave face about it. It's a 640 Gb (Portable western digital) hard drive that worked well at first as NTFS with paragon until recently when it couldn't mount anymore. I resorted to formatting it as well and it worked the first time after mounting only to revoke access on the second attempt at transferring files.
Please assist as I'd rather use a bigger drives to store my files. Any reason why it doesn't on double its storage size?

GizoMot said:
I have two Hard drives, one is a 320Gb (Portable Seagate momentus) which I successfully formatted to exFAT and can access & copy files back and forth through my OTG cable to the S5. It mounts perfectly as USBDRIVEA without the need for paragon NTFS+exFAT.
My second hard drive however is a different story together, I'm quite new to Android though I pull a brave face about it. It's a 640 Gb (Portable western digital) hard drive that worked well at first as NTFS with paragon until recently when it couldn't mount anymore. I resorted to formatting it as well and it worked the first time after mounting only to revoke access on the second attempt at transferring files.
Please assist as I'd rather use a bigger drives to store my files. Any reason why it doesn't on double its storage size?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thats odd it works fine with my 1000 Gb hard drive, did you unmount your HDD in paragon settings before you disconnect?

Yes immediately after completing the format I was able to mount on the phone as it recognized it as USBDRIVEA even without opening ParagonNTFS which I then checked in any case to get the file directory to use with root explorer.
I dismounted the drive successfully through paragon, then again on the notification panel to safely remove and that's the end of it. Next time I tried to mount I got the "OEM Evaluation" notification under the same drive I had previously mounted. I even restarted my phone assuming there was a problem with my OTG cable.
I've reformatted to the default NTFS, I can only view but not transfer to my drive from the phone or vice versa.
Another thing, on NTFS format I still get a "blank drive" notification on mounting though I can view the contents. Uninstalled paragon twice as well.