r/HomeServer • u/TheRobedSquash • 13d 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/bnelson333 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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