Asus Routing

In case you didn't know, I'm one of those nerdy people who does nothing by the book when it comes to technology. I roll my own way. An example is the fact that I don't pay for cable. I have over the air antennas hooked up to a computer in my living room. I've blogged about that before.

A few years back I took an old beat up 10+ year old HP computer and installed a SATA RAID controller and two 1.5 terabyte hard drives to setup a Windows Home Server. This was pretty cool because Windows Home Server kind of "automagically" backs up your network for you. I proceeded to RIP all my old CD's onto my Home Server and setup my TV Computer to double as a juke box (streaming music from my server). Life was good.

Just this last week, one of those trusty 1.5 terabyte hard drives failed leaving my Home Server quite unhappy. I should mention that the failed drive was a Seagate. Seagate if officially on my shit list. I've put together dozens of computers in my lifetime and have had exactly 2 hard drive crashes. Both of them were Seagates. This is my third Seagate to crash and this drive was the "free replacement" for my previous Seagate to crash.

I bought a new router a while back. It's an ASUS RT-N66U. It has two USB plugs in the back. I didn't really know it when I bought the router (I bought it for the 5 GHz WiFi), but you can plug external hard drives into this router and set it up to act as a file server.

When my Home Server crashed, I ordered a 1.5 terabyte Western Digital Passport (external drive) to plug into the back of the router and take over "music server" duties. Basically, my router paired with the external drive was going to take over the job of my old HP computer (minus some of the nifty bonuses like automatically backing up stuff).

I plugged the Passport into the router today and it recognized it, but failed to "mount it". It would tell me the Passport was there, but it wouldn't let me see any of the folders. This was bad.

Initially, I thought maybe it was a power problem. Unlike most external hard drives, the Passport gets all of its power from the USB. Maybe the Asus simply does not supply enough power?

After a bit of research and some monkeying around, I am here to tell you that the Western Digital has some kind of security thing setup on its external drives and the Asus Router is not happy with this configuration. One guy said you can download a "Western Digital Security App" to disable this roadblock. I don't like downloading apps even though it sounds like this is something you can probably get directly from Western Digital.

I plugged the USB drive into my laptop, opened my trusty Cygwin command shell and did an ls -a on the drive. Sure enough, there was a suspicious looking folder called, "$RECYCLE.BIN".

I did rm -rf $RECYCLE.BIN and was greeted with a "Permission Denied" error. So I did a chmod -R a+rwx $RECYCLE.BIN and then the rm -rf $RECYCLE.BIN was successful.

I took the Passport back to my Asus Router and now everything works as it should and I'm happier than a kid in the candy store!

In case you're coming here for the link to Durango's bloggings, he hasn't done anything worth while today :). And now, neither have I!