Thanks for your help thus far. I might have to come back to this later, my attention has alas been diverted by a new problem. The external drive in question (a Transcend 2TB model I purchased only a few months ago) is now playing up. I'm just running an extended SMART test on it which is going to take all night. Maybe I'll have to start a new thread depending on the results of that. This drive has 2 partitions. The first, 700GB or so, ext4, for backup of someone else's machine. The second, taking the rest of the disk, originally xfs for my music files. Trying to update my music collection across the LAN in Clementine was going up to around 95%, then dropping back down a few per cent, endlessly, for hours. With that and the other apparent difficulties the router has with xfs (trying to 'verify' the xfs partition in the router's tools never completes whilst the other ext4 one finishes in half a minute), I decided to back up the data and reformat the 2nd partition as ext4, which it turns out is actually the recommended native format for this router. I did that with the openSUSE partitioner. Copied the music back over (about 150GB). Now, on plugging the drive into the router, the drive access light is permanently flashing every couple of seconds, which it never did before. If I touch the drive I can feel that every few seconds there is some clunking, though not audible. It seems to be in a seek loop. Plugged it directly into my PCs and same thing happens once mounted. Mounting the first partition on its own is fine. Tried deleting and reformatting the second partition with GParted on the other PC, and even with no data copied over, as soon as I mount it I get the same seek issues. It's probably under warranty but it's a bummer since it's potentially the first proper drive failure I've had in twenty years (excluding the drive in my old laptop which got scratched from my physically thumping it repeatedly :) but even then I was able to repartition around the damaged area and it's still working thirteen years later). This Transcend drive features 'military-grade' shock absorption and casing, and has a Samsung Spinpoint inside. It's always been mounted/unmounted correctly, and never dropped or bashed about. I hadn't expected it to give up this quickly :( -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org