Node - NTFS usb drive appears then disappears at startup

[Hamlet]

Greetings,
I have an NTFS USB hard drive plugged in my mini PC.
I have installed ntfs-3g.
When I reboot the Proxmox node, the "Disks" section shows the disk. "Lsblk" command also shows the disk ("sda"-> "sda1")

However, only a few seconds after, the USB drive disappears from both "Disks" and "Lsblk".
But the device can still be seen under "lsusb".

EDIT : I have an OMV VM. It seems that shutting it down "liberates" the hard drive, and i can see it back in the "Disks" and "Lsblk" section. Is it a normal behaviour ?


Coud you help me solve the issue ?
Kind redards,
Hamlet.

 

[Folke]

Hi,
that sound like you passed the USB device through to your OMV VM and when the VM boots up, the drive is unloaded from the host system and given to the guest system. Unfortunately, it's not possible to use a device on both at the same time.
If that is the case, you should see a USB device in the hardware section of the OMV VM.

If not, could you post the system logs of a boot process until the drive vanishes?

 

[Hamlet]

Hello @Folke
thank you for your confirmation - that's exactly it, the USB hard drive appears in the VM "Hardware" section ("USB Device (usb0) --- host=3-6").
Good to learn that that if it passed through to the VM turned on, it can't appear at the Node "Disks" level. I am completely beginning virtualization and Proxmox, so I guess I have yet to learn many of those principles.

As a follow-up, may I ask you about NFS settings ?

• I have assumed to let the USB drive (NTFS) passed through to my OMV VM.
• I have set-up, inside OMV, a shared NFS (and SMB) set of folders.
• My intent is to "add them back" to Proxmox at the Datacenter level ("Storage->Add"), so I can add them to a Jellyfin container.
• I have been trying to add either an NFS or SMB folder (named "test") based on the ones I defined in OMV
• But unfortunately i keep coming across an error

- NFS : "create storage failed: mkdir /mnt/pve/test/images: Read-only file system at /usr/share/perl5/PVE/Storage/Plugin.pm line 1405. (500)"
- SMB/CIFS : "create storage failed: mkdir /mnt/pve/test/images: Read-only file system at /usr/share/perl5/PVE/Storage/Plugin.pm line 1405. (500)"

Now I have seen several topics which are related, but unfortunately they have not proved fruitful for my case so far.
If I am not mistake, I read the NTFS partition can inherently cause issue when we try to add an NFS or SMB folder to the PVE Datacenter "Storage" ?

Many thanks in advance for your kind help,
H.

 

[Folke]

Unfortunately, I'm out of office until Monday, but I can give some quick pointers before I'm out:

• Your network share seems to be read only. When the storage is configured to be used for VM images and the like, pve (Proxmox VE) expects to be able to write to them and tries to create some directories.
• You won't be able to get access to the files by adding a disk for a container on that network share, instead you would need to mount it on the host system and create a bind mount for the container to the directory with the media files. More here

Sorry that I can't help more at the moment, but I have a train to catch.

 

[Hamlet]

Thank you so much for the guidance @Folke while you are out of office, it's much appreciated !

 

[Hamlet]

UPDATE :

I think (but I am not 100% sure), that the issue was about an "unclean" state of the NTFS file system.
By running "ntfsfix", and then doing again the process of adding the NFS and SMB folder, it worked.

So right now I have :
- Proxmox bare metal on mini-PC
- Jellyfin as an LXC container
- OMV as a VM, with an external USB (NTFS) HDD passed through
- Said disk mounted in the OMV gui, with folders shared under NFS and SMB
- Said folders added in the Proxmox Datacenter ("Storage"), and bind mounted in the Jellyfin container.
- Jellyfin gui which can finally detect the folders and add them in the media library
- Other local PCs under Windows can access the folders on Windows Explorer (i guess that's the SMB)

Honestly I am absolutely not sure of everything I did, but it works.
Next step would be to learn more and try to see where I can optimze things.

No doubt there will be many more questions to come!

Thanks,

H.