You can connect your external hard disk, SSD, or USB stick to any of the USB ports on the Raspberry Pi, and mount the file system to access the data stored on it.
I have a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B that I've been using solely as a Kodi movie player via USB hard drives, for years now. It's always run incredibly smooth, and as I kept adding content, I kept getting more and more hard drives, until I had 6 hard drives going into the machine at a combined storage of 12 TB, with around 1,800 movies. I want to play commercial DVD movies with a Raspberry Pi and a connected USB DVD drive. I want to play DVD's with region code 1 and 2 (US and Europe). I haven't bought the USB DVD drive yet, because I need to know some facts before. To buy the right USB DVD drive, I need to know how LibreELEC plays region encoded DVD's.
By default, your Raspberry Pi automatically mounts some of the popular file systems such as FAT, NTFS, and HFS+ at the /media/pi/<HARD-DRIVE-LABEL>
location.
- Raspberry Pi 3 B – This is an earlier revision of the 3 B+, it has a slower Ethernet connection but is still very suitable for a network-attached Kodi box. It sports a Quad Core 1.2GHz Broadcom BCM2837 64bit CPU. It also has WiFi and Bluetooth. Raspberry Pi 2 B – An older version but still very popular. It has Wired Ethernet but no WiFi.
- This project uses the popular Raspberry Pi 3+ with the free and open source Kodi media player application to create a home theatre in your home (or bedroom). We show you how to install the Kodi media player onto your RPi so you can play videos, music, podcasts and other media files from an SD card or hard drive onto a TV or monitor.
To set up your storage device so that it always mounts to a specific location of your choice, you must mount it manually.
Mounting a storage device
You can mount your storage device at a specific folder location. It is conventional to do this within the /mnt folder, for example /mnt/mydisk. Note that the folder must be empty.
- Plug the storage device into a USB port on the Raspberry Pi.
List all the disk partitions on the Pi using the following command:
The Raspberry Pi uses mount points
/
and/boot
. Your storage device will show up in this list, along with any other connected storage.- Use the SIZE, LABEL, and MODEL columns to identify the name of the disk partition that points to your storage device. For example,
sda1
. The FSTYPE column contains the filesystem type. If your storage device uses an exFAT file system, install the exFAT driver:
If your storage device uses an NTFS file system, you will have read-only access to it. If you want to write to the device, you can install the ntfs-3g driver:
Run the following command to get the location of the disk partition:
For example,
/dev/sda1
.Create a target folder to be the mount point of the storage device. The mount point name used in this case is
mydisk
. You can specify a name of your choice:Mount the storage device at the mount point you created:
Verify that the storage device is mounted successfully by listing the contents:
Setting up automatic mounting
You can modify the fstab
file to define the location where the storage device will be automatically mounted when the Raspberry Pi starts up. In the fstab
file, the disk partition is identified by the universally unique identifier (UUID).
Get the UUID of the disk partition:
- Find the disk partition from the list and note the UUID. For example,
5C24-1453
. Open the fstab file using a command line editor such as nano:
Add the following line in the
fstab
file:Replace
fstype
with the type of your file system, which you found in step 2 of 'Mounting a storage device' above, for example:ntfs
.- If the filesystem type is FAT or NTFS, add
,umask=000
immediately afternofail
- this will allow all users full read/write access to every file on the storage device.
Kodi Raspberry Pi Os
Now that you have set an entry in fstab
, you can start up your Raspberry Pi with or without the storage device attached. Before you unplug the device you must either shut down the Pi, or manually unmount it using the steps in 'Unmounting a storage device' below.
Note: if you do not have the storage device attached when the Pi starts, the Pi will take an extra 90 seconds to start up. You can shorten this by adding ,x-systemd.device-timeout=30
immediately after nofail
in step 4. This will change the timeout to 30 seconds, meaning the system will only wait 30 seconds before giving up trying to mount the disk.
For more information on each Linux command, refer to the specific manual page using the man
command. For example, man fstab
.
Unmounting a storage device
When the Raspberry Pi shuts down, the system takes care of unmounting the storage device so that it is safe to unplug it. If you want to manually unmount a device, you can use the following command:
If you receive an error that the 'target is busy', this means that the storage device was not unmounted. If no error was displayed, you can now safely unplug the device.
Raspberry Pi Kodi 18
Dealing with 'target is busy'
The 'target is busy' message means there are files on the storage device that are in use by a program. To close the files, use the following procedure.
Kodi Raspberry Pi Usb Drive Path
Close any program which has open files on the storage device.
If you have a terminal open, make sure that you are not in the folder where the storage device is mounted, or in a sub-folder of it.
If you are still unable to unmount the storage device, you can use the
lsof
tool to check which program has files open on the device. You need to first installlsof
usingapt
:To use lsof: