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Coolmax CN-330

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Haselsmasher

New Around Here
I just bought a Coolmax CN-330. It's a really neat little unit. However I'm having a bit of trouble.

I can get it up and running on the LAN - no problem. Works great.

I'm having trouble getting it to act as an external hard drive connected via USB to a Windows PC. When I format the hard drive using the web-based configuration tools it creates three partitions on the drive. Those partitions are un-named. Then, when I go into the Disk Management applet after the NAS unit is connected via USB, I'm not able to assign a drive letter to a partition. The Disk Management won't let me do anything with any of those three partitions.

Coolmax support says I need to name the partitions, apparently through the mgmt tool, but I see no way to do this.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? While Coolmax Support has been good at responding to my messages, the content of the responses are pretty cryptic.

Thanks.

Jim
 
The device probably formatted the USB drive with a Linux file system like EXT3. If so, you need a EXT2/3 driver for windows, and on any computer that will directly connect to the drive via USB.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

Once installed, mount the drive and assign the Drive letter using the IFS drive utility in the control Panel (switch to classic view).

I would personally reformat the drive in Windows using the Diskt Managemnt tool to the Fat32 file system (and not NTFS). Most NAS devices use a Linux based OS, which can natively write to FAT32 drives and EXT3 drives. It can read an NTFS drive but can not write to it.

You do not need to install IFS to format the EXT3 drive, just do it from the Windows Disk Management tool. Delete the three partitions so the entire drive is unallocated space then create a new fat32 partition.
 
Last edited:
Oh man you're awesome! Using FAT32 did it. My Windows machine is Vista so I couldn't format in FAT32 directly. Since the disc was not FAT32 Vista wouldn't even assign it a letter when I connected it - so I couldn't use (or I didn't know how to use) formatfat32 or whatever that utility is.

I formatted it in the NAS device for FAT32. When I connected it to the PC it saw it. Outstanding. (I have to reboot the NAS device while connected to USB in order to get it to recognize it. Is that normal for this class of devices? I was hoping I could hot plug in the USB like any other external drive.)

Thanks a lot!

Jim
 

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