Support for using external storage alongside internal storage
Much more robust and faster external storage handling
Low disk space notification
What the heck are bundles?
Bundles are a bunch of files zipped up together and sent as a single file. They appear in the settings panel as a single item, but they contain a collection of files. As a result, you no longer run into a situation where you open a piece of content and the image is missing, or the content won’t appear in the Library view because metadata isn’t downloaded yet.
What happened to the external storage?
In the previous versions, only one storage device was supported at a time. Because of this, data from internal storage was always copied over to newly plugged-in external storage. Problem with this solution was that, if copying takes too long, the hotplug fails silently and you end up with a receiver that won’t start the user interface. This is no longer the case and external storage is used alongside internal storage as an extension, therefore not requiring any copying. As a result, external storage should mount much faster and the interface would continue to work without interruption during hotplug.
There are a few limitation still:
You can still use only one external storage device.
After plugging in the external storage, remaining free space on internal storage is not used at all so it kind of gets wasted (though logs and similar things are still written to internal storage, so it’s not totally wasted).
What’s going to be in RC3?
There is one more thing that got left out of RC2. We will remove the requirement to label external storage as EXT_STORE to simplify the operation.
I upgraded my Lighthouse from outernet-rx-2.5a2 to outernet-rx-2.5rc3, and the 300 pages of files presumably extracted from the bundles files in the News directories all disappeared from my Library.
I used the USB stick method renaming the outernet-rx-2.5rc3.pkg to wt200.pkg.
On my storage device settings, I now see 2 storage locations, and the new files being downloaded are going into the internal storage rather than the external storage as before. How do I know that? At 2107 UTC my internal storage had 178.34 MB stored, and hard drive had 2.12 GB stored. Now at 2120 UTC, internal storage has 180.9 MB stored, and hard drive still has 2.12 GB stored. Ken
Is the hard drive connection stable? No loose cables, no hard drive suddenly losing power? I see a whole bunch of content being periodically added and removed, as if the hard drive was connected and disconnected multiple times.
It will no doubt complain that there are errors on the disk. Let it fix the errors.
Check the contents of the disk, make sure everything is there.
Plug the disk back in and power the receiver up.
After that, see if you see the files that were on the disk (may take a few minutes before you see them all). If you don’t, please send me the logs again.
Bundles is empty, News has all the files that I used to see (in 2.5a2 version) in the Library, Outernet Weekly Selections has all the same files, and updates has an empty wt200 folder.
Hm, something’s definitely up with your hard drive or rc3 image. Can you try using an USB stick and see if it will use it as external storage using the same command above? Btw, rc3 no longer requires EXT_STORE label, so you can just plug in the stick.
