Linkstation usb drive options

[Pgro]

Hi All,
I've owned a Linkstation LS-CH640L for around 12 years now and I have to say, it doesn't owe me a thing. I recently decided I'd like to add some additional storage as 640gb doesn't go very far these days. I have a spare 500gb drive doing nothing, so plugged it in. The Linkstation doesn't see it. I tried shutting down the Linkstation and the drive, starting the drive, then the Linkstation, but the Linkstation just hangs and only completes the reboot if I unplug the drive.

At this point the drive was formatted NTFS, so I reformatted FAT32, mistakenly creating a standard 32gb partition. The drive was visible from the Linkstation, but of course not as useful as I'd hoped. I reformatted FAT32 extended, taking in the whole drive. Nothing doing.

In desperation, I downloaded Ubuntu and reformatted the drive to XFS, thinking surely the Linkstation would be happy, but no - I get the same result - the Linkstation hangs on reboot..

I'm a beaten man. I can't think of anything else to try.

My only thoughts are that the usb drive has a maximum of 32gb capacity? Nothing in the manual and nothing in any of the forums? Am I the only Buffalo customer to try this?

Any ideas would be very welcome.

[1000001101000]

I think most models can format if for you if you attach it while blank.

[Pgro]

I have also tried that. The Linkstation boots up ok, but still doesn't see the drive so it's not in the drop-down box to choose to format.

One more piece of information - firmware is v1.12. I downloaded v1.75, but it didn't allow me to update. I assume this is because v1.75 isn't suitable for my Linkstation.

[Pgro]

Hi all,
I've made a little progress, but still short of a perfect solution...

I bought a HDD enclosure and moved the drive to it, then tried the connection to Linkstation - success!


I realised the drive was now formatted NTFS - which would make it read only, so quickly switched to the Linkstation disk formatting option and chose the default XFS. Formatting failed.

Also tried EXT3  and FAT32 options and they also failed.

Any ideas anyone?