My balena image doesn't support ntfs or exfat for USB. Which one should I use? :)

Product support
#1

Hello,
I started running into issues mounting a USB drive when running my app after some time of non-use (was working for a long time):

FROM balenalib/%%BALENA_MACHINE_NAME%%-node:16

(this was :latest, locked it down for now due to another unrelated error, could be a contributor)

After some troubleshooting of my exfat AND ntfs drives not being recognized, e.g.:

server  mount: /mnt/MYDRIVE: unknown filesystem type 'exfat'.
...
server  mount: /mnt/MYDRIVE: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'.

I read here that I should check that the file system is supported. Perhaps these were removed from the node image at some point, or :16 doesn’t have the support that :latest has?:

Output:

cat /proc/filesystems
nodev   sysfs
nodev   rootfs
nodev   ramfs
nodev   bdev
nodev   proc
nodev   cpuset
nodev   cgroup
nodev   cgroup2
nodev   tmpfs
nodev   devtmpfs
nodev   configfs
nodev   debugfs
nodev   tracefs
nodev   securityfs
nodev   sockfs
nodev   bpf
nodev   pipefs
nodev   rpc_pipefs
nodev   devpts
        ext3
        ext2
        ext4
        squashfs
        vfat
        msdos
nodev   nfs
nodev   nfs4
nodev   autofs
nodev   overlay
        f2fs
nodev   mqueue

I can post a lot more code if it helps (followed this sometime back though and it was great), yet I think I have it narrowed down above. Do you have a recommendation of which image I should use that supports node and will support ntfs for mounting of USB drives?

Thanks for taking a look!

Chris

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#2

I figured it out. :slight_smile: I just needed to add a package or two.

It eventually grabs this image (I corrected the tag to 16.13.0): balenalib/raspberrypi4-64-debian-node:16.13.0. To support both:

RUN install_packages util-linux fuse ntfs-3g exfat-fuse exfat-utils

There’s a chance this could be overkill. For example, util-linux us used for unrelated reasons. I may still have an extra something in there.

1 Like
#3

Hi @owntheweb, glad you found a solution and thank you for sharing it :blush: do let us know if you have any other questions.