External drive not recognized

For past year, I’m running RPI with usb flash drive for booting and a external WD 2.5” 5gb for recordings. When power cycling, I would get a solid red light on my pi. To solve this, I disconnect the ext drive and boot it up, then reconnect the drive.

Fast forward to tonight…I power cycled due to lagging video and after reconnecting the external drive, it looks like it is not recognizing the drive anymore. I disabled the dvr feature and tried to restart that, but the drive can’t be found.

I’ve submitted support diagnostic report.

Did you image the Channels Pi OS onto both the WD and flash drive? Or just the flash drive?

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If you plug the Easystore into a computer does it work and can you see all your recordings?

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Pretty sure I just imaged the flash drive with the channels image.

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Amazing that you’ve responded so quickly! Thank you.

The recorded shows are viewable when drive is plugged into windows PC.

Drive is currently formatted NTFS.

Are you on Mac or PC?

Can you run a check on the disk?

I see it's marked as not clean and our image is failing to mount. I will investigate a fix on our side.

Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server systemd[1]: Found device easystore_2647 easystore.
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server systemd[1]: Starting File System Check on /dev/sdb1...
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server systemd-fsck[1847]: sdb1: fsck.ntfs doesn't exist, not checking file system.
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server systemd[1]: Finished File System Check on /dev/sdb1.
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server systemd[1]: Starting Mount USB Drive on sdb1...
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server usb-mount[1848]: Mount point: /media/easystore
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server usb-mount[1865]: mount: /media/easystore: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server usb-mount[1848]: Error mounting /dev/sdb1 (status = 0)
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server kernel: ntfs3: sdb1: volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server systemd[1]: [email protected]: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server systemd[1]: [email protected]: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jan 30 18:26:44 dvr-server systemd[1]: Failed to start Mount USB Drive on sdb1.
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Checking the drive from a windows PC. Smart status says it’s ok.

Working on running crystal disc info on it now

Run chkdsk from the command prompt:

You can also try the new Pi OS update. Click and hold the "Check for Update" button at the top for one second.

Yikes. Lots of errors detected. How do I fix this?

Yea not unexpected if you've been yanking the power.

Did you run with /f

This fix didn't work. I'm uploading another update

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  • Check the identifier of the bad disk. e.g d
  • Open the "cmd" terminal of windows.
  • Input chkdsk <disk>: /f to fix it.
    Where <disk> is the identifier, e.g chkdsk d: /f
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I tried reconnecting the drive and initiated the dvr and it just works! Thanks very much for your help. A+++

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Is there something I can do that would allow me to keep the external drive plugged in while rebooting?

You'd have to plug in an hdmi and see what's happening that's causing it not to work with both drives attached