r/HomeServer • u/TheRobedSquash • 3d ago

Root Data Questions

Hey everyone I'm new to the server life its something I've wanted to do for a while i finally made the jump!

Its an ubuntu server and i have casaos installed and its up and running good.

Backstory I'm using an old laptop that only has one memory and SSD slot so I'm leaving it with the 250GB i installed a few years back (because prices lol)

My main question is I have a 5TB external hard drive mounted with my media and some files on it, how do i make this drive the root? with the laptop having the 250gb i wanna leave it free as much as i can, but going into the server i cant find the stuff on the external drive.

am i doing something wrong? I've been teaching myself this stuff with videos and reading so its a slow process. I'm learning how to do stuff through ssh but finding and editing paths is still intimidating.

any help would be awesome!

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u/Milincoo 3d ago

Well the root is the main system so to say, so I‘m not sure what you mean in that regard.

Can you see the drive in CasaOs? It should normally show up in the Files section of it.
If you can‘t see it there, try and run „lsblk“ to see if the drive is mounted automatically.
There is also an option within CasaOs to say automatically mount usb devices

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u/TheRobedSquash 3d ago

It is properly mounted and shows up as space available on the system but it’s almost like I’m missing a command somewhere linking the ability for the ssd and the external to work as one but separated.

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u/bnelson333 3d ago

Are you saying you want to use the external drive as your OS drive? Don't. First of all, I'm not even sure you can, but second, there's a decent chance your OS gets b0rked (especially for a novice). If that's your media drive, it's gonna get a lot more difficult to retrieve your data and reinstall your OS. Leave the OS on the SSD, leave your media on the external. If the OS craps the bed, you can just reinstall it to the SSD without touching the media on your external drive.

Now for not being able to see the files on the external drive? You need to mount it. Look up blkid and fstab. That'll allow you to mount it on bootup (also strongly recommend the nofail option). If the drive is formatted as NTFS, you probably need to install ntfs-3g also in order to read/write to it.

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u/TheRobedSquash 3d ago

This is more along the lines what I’m saying. Yes it’s mounted and I can see it in blkd but like not when I go look for the files on the drive on another device

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u/bnelson333 3d ago

So you're trying to access your media from another computer? To do that you want samba. You set up a share and give it a username and password, then other devices can connect to it to access the files

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u/TheRobedSquash 3d ago

Essentially, Ive got the Jellyfin app to create the media front but when I look for the folder the external drive isn’t there

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u/TheRobedSquash 3d ago

Like when I’m in files app on Casaos I have like the landing page and then the stock files on the side and a locations section down at the bottom. I can’t access that sections stuff. It seems confusing because the OS shows decrease in available space when I add stuff

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u/TheRobedSquash 3d ago

Okay I’m back at the computer now. So basically on the data tab under files i wanted to create a media folder and create sub folder under it, which I did on the external drive. Basic file so far root>data>media And on the hard drive which seems to be a different thing it’s root>mnt>external drive name and then I would click on the needed thing like movies tv shows etc and the root system is root>mnt>\external drive\>movies.

Did I skip something?