On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 3:09 PM John Jason Jordan <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Oct 2023 07:43:41 -0700 > Michael Ewan <[email protected]> dijo: > > >The best way to make something read only (even by root) is using the > >chattr immutable (i) flag, i.e. sudo chattr +i file > > Copying ~2,000 MP3 files onto a 256GB SD card to be inserted into an > Android phone has turned into a major project. Part of the problem is > copying the files from an external Thunderbolt 3 drive to the SD card > takes five or six hours, so each time usually ends up happening > overnight. > > Another problem is inserting the card into the phone, because it > usually fails to connect, so the phone doesn't even see it. If whoever > did the engineering on that tiny tray and its connections were working > for me, they would be looking for a new job. > > Regarding Android and the filesystems, forget ext4. All the literature > swears that ext4 is supported, in fact, apparently Android uses ext4 > itself, but for external storage to be ext# the phone has to be rooted, > and I mean 'rooted,' not just unlocked. > > Other choices are FAT32 or exFAT, but only models from the last few > years can do exFAT. My phone can handle exFAT, but if there's any > restriction on its ability to write to the medium I get 'unsupported > drive.' I found that out after I formatted the card exFAT, but accepted > the utility's offer to make the filesystem require my password. The > utility was Gnome-Disks, sort of Gnome's answer to GParted. > > Last night I reformatted the card yet again, at least the sixth or > seventh time, and this time did just plain exFAT. Then overnight I > copied all the files to it (yet again), and this morning I discovered > that about one in four won't play from the card. If I play the same > file from the TB3 drive it works fine, and it also works fine if I > delete the copy on the card and then copy it back from the TB3 drive. > For the overnight copy I used drag and drop from a GUI file manager, > which appeared to be working fine when I went to bed. > > Today's job is going to be figuring out which of the files won't play > and re-copying them from the source. This will take several hours, but > less time than wiping them all out and re-copying. I considered doing > 'cp -R' from the command line instead of GUI drag and drop, but I > suspect that I'd still end up with a quarter of them unplayable. I > should add that 100% of the source files play perfectly, so the problem > was caused by something in the copy process. For why I have no clues. > > In all of this I discovered that my phone has a feature to connect to a > network file server via its wifi. All of the MP3s are on my Synology > NAS and, amazingly, I got the phone to connect to it and I can see all > the files. I considered the idea of just putting the card into the > phone with nothing on it, then filling it up over wifi from the > Synology, but doing that from a tiny screen on the phone is maddening. > It might not be so bad if I could find a command line where I could do > the Android version of 'cp -R,' but I don't know if that is even > possible. > > Stay tuned for the rest of the saga. :) > You could just do a few mp3 files to begin with to find out if it works and then copy them all over after you have perfected a solution. Bill
