asheenlevrai Posted May 17, 2021 Share #1 Posted May 17, 2021 Hi everyone What is the minimal size for the USB dongle that will host the XPenology loader? AFAIU, this dongle will host very little data (just the loader) and there is no point in having much free space on this drive, right? Thank you very much in advance for your help. Best, -a- PS: I tried to figure out this myself by unplugging the USB dongle from my working Xpen rig and plug it into a windows machine. I was hoping I could figure out how much free space was left on the USB dongle. However, when I did that, Windows add issues mounting the USB drive. At the 1st attempt, it mounted 2 volumes. The first one had very few files on it (I couldn't find the Grub folder that was there when I created the USB loader) and the 2nd volume couldn't be read (Windows offered to format it but I obviously declined). After this, when I tried again, Windows simply couldn't mount anything (USB connection-deconnection loop). It may be an issue with my Windows machine, though. Fortunately, the USB loader seems to still work fine in my Xpen rig. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SnowDrifter Posted May 17, 2021 Share #2 Posted May 17, 2021 Less than a gig That's normal behavior on windows machine. If you need to reformat, open command prompt type diskpart listdisk select disk X attributes disk clear readonly clean create partition primary select partition 1 active format fs=ntfs label=new assign That'll get it back and readable by windows. Can reformat and image over as needed 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flyride Posted May 17, 2021 Share #3 Posted May 17, 2021 10 hours ago, asheenlevrai said: What is the minimal size for the USB dongle that will host the XPenology loader? You can answer this yourself by observing the size of the loader image on your PC before loading it onto the USB drive. Approximately 50MB. You can also determine this by fdisk -l at the DSM command line: Device Start End Sectors Size Type /dev/synoboot1 2048 32767 30720 15M EFI System /dev/synoboot2 32768 94207 61440 30M Linux filesystem /dev/synoboot3 94208 102366 8159 4M BIOS boot So a 64MB USB key is adequate, although any USB key that small is so slow, you probably don't want to use it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
asheenlevrai Posted May 18, 2021 Author Share #4 Posted May 18, 2021 Thank you both very much for your replies @flyride such a small/slow dongle would be problematic for what reason? IIUC it's only used at boot until the OS is loaded from the HDDs, right? A slow drive would only mean slower boot times, or is there any other drawback? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flyride Posted May 18, 2021 Share #5 Posted May 18, 2021 Slower boots and slightly increased time for updates (which may not be terribly relevant at this point). 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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