Hello,
I am installing Umbrel OS on my Raspberry Pi 5 with a 4TB SSD. However, in the Umbrel OS settings, I notice that it only detects 2TB.
FYI, umbrel is installed directly on the 4TB Nvme and not on an SD card.
Of course, I didn’t apply any disk settings.
Is this a limitation or is there a problem with my installation?
Thank you.
Hey @Khaosan I think there may be something here in regards to umbrelOS and how it handles installing the OS to the external drive, but I can’t remember the details at the moment.
Would you be comfortable running a few commands in the terminal? It’s possible (but probably unlikely) that maybe its a partition table issue. MBR can only address 2tb of disk space. Can you try to install gnu parted and print your disk layout?
Open your terminal: settings > advanced > terminal
sudo apt install parted
sudo /sbin/parted
Parted is a tui tool so you can issue some commands such as print list. It will look something like this
Notice my partition table is set to gpt which required for over 2tb disks.
BINGO! msdos partition table apparently means MBR. Which I have never seen or used myself. Looks like we have found your issue. Now how to fix it… Unfortunately partition tables are configured during installation when running of another media. They are static and you will have to start the installation over again in order to fix it.
If this is not something you chose at startup (which is not an option for the x86 install) then it may have been because your install media was not partitioned using GPT. Did you follow the rpi nvme guide for install and use Etcher? I think it may be possible that etcher loaded the image using MBR? I don’t remember that being an option in Etcher but I can double check.
I’m sorry I don’t have a similar setup I could try this myself. I’ll see if I can find any more info on setting partition tables up if I can.
Correction
I have some more info. It’s been a while since I installed an OS on the Raspberry Pi and I forgot that a requirement for a boot drive is that it must use the MBR partition table, it does not correctly support GPT or the ability to address larger sectors. This is a limitation of the Pi unfortunately.
That means you can only ever use 2tb of your SSD if you want to boot from it. You can optionally use an SD card or another device to boot from, and use your nvme drive as external storage for your apps to bypass this issue.
Finally, if you need to wipe your dive after you installed umbrelOS on it, you’ll need to wipe your nvme disk manually, the installer checks to see if umbrel was installed previously on a disk so it doesn’t accidentally erase everything. I hope that all made sense, please let me know if you got confused anywhere!
Good morning
Thank you for your help and advices !
No, I didn’t follow the RPi nvme guide, but the way I did the installation is identical.
The rest of your analysis is unfortunately correct. the Rpi cannot have more than 2TB since the publication table is in MBR.
I will follow your advice and install UmbrelOS on an SD card and GPT partition the nvme in order to use its full capacity.
Once again, thank you for taking the time to help me.
