Slate Samba File Copy Failures and Corrupted Files

Technical Support for Routers
1

I have a MicroSD in the Slate EXT card slot. In my testing I could copy some small files to the card with Samba from a Windows 11 machine. However it does fail frequently. The issues I'm obvserving so far:

Cound not find the item error (could happen for small files)

When copying from Windows to the router, I get the "Cound not find the item" error with a description "This is no longer located in . Verify that item's location and try again". This happens to small files too. One example is a 230K binary file. The file is right there and I can copy it to another folder on the same Windows machine successfully. I can continue to copy some other files (including larger files) to the Samba drive after the failure. When a file fails to copy, it basically always fails. Makes me think it has something to do with the files but many files fail.

Unexpected network error (typically for large files)

When copying large from Windows to the router, I get "An unexpected error is keeping you from copying the file. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem." "Error 0x8007003B: An unexpected network error occurred." I looked it up. It may have to do with space on the drive but it's a 512GB microSD card almost empty. The file is about 6GB. Maybe it's an internal file size limit I'm hitting? I'm running the latest firmware on the Slate EXT.

Corrupt files left on the shared drive

When the error above happens, I see a file of the same size (say, 6GB) on the shared drive but md5sum would show that it's corrupt. Seeing a file of the right size on the card sometimes makes me think that it's a good copy and I then would delete the original file. I'd like to avoid this mistake if possible :slight_smile:

I bought the 512GB card specifically for file sharing. Any help would be appreciated!

1 Like
2

3 idea about this:

  1. Is the SD card fine? Maybe it's just broken.
  2. Is there enough RAM for samba to run? Check htop or top while copying a big file.
  3. Is the filesystem on the SD card fine? Maybe format it once more.
1 Like
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Samba is just not optimized yet, I’m a person that always uses that service. Even on the powerful Flint 2, I had constant problems just like you said. And I read they’re optimizing it but we’ll have to wait.

And no, it’s not the hardware, I’ve tried multiple USB drives and 2 external SSDs and I always have issues copying files, it works but you’re gonna encounter issues.

As a bonus, based on my experience, the Samba server worked better for me with the open source based firmware.

4

Thanks for the reply.

  1. yes, it's a new SD card. I also tried a brand new USB drive, same issues.
  2. I'm not sure how much RAM is needed but copying small files fails too. The same problems happen on my new Brume 2 device also with most RAM free.
  3. I formatted both the new SD card and the USB drive a few times. I think it's a software issue :frowning:

GL.iNet please look into this. Right now share storage is not usable at all, even for small files on neither of my devices, with neither of my new storage card/drive. It'll copy a few files then fail for most.

5

Do you use exFAT as file system? This causes trouble. Try ext4.

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Yes, both the microSD and USB drive are exFAT because I was hoping that I could also use them on my Windows machines. I'll give ext4 a try. Thanks for the suggestion!

7

Update: I re-formatted the USB drive to ext4 and copied a few files. They worked fine. Thanks for the tips!