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. :)
