Hello, I fear I’ve done something silly and I need to check next steps before I do anything even sillier.
I have decided to dispense with hundreds of old CDs but before I do, I’m going to rip those that aren’t already digitised and add them to my Roon library. My music is stored on a Samsung SSD attached to an Intel NUC running ROCK. This is attached to my router and my main interface is via a Mac Mini that isn’t physically attached to the router.
To start the ball rolling and check my workflow, I ripped one CD and saved it to my Mac hard drive. Then - and this is when I think I made my mistake - I detached the SSD from the NUC and attached it to the Mac, copied the newly ripped files onto the SSD and then reattached it to the NUC. But Roon couldn’t see any of my local music files. And when I looked at the Storage folder of the NUC via Mac Finder, there didn’t appear to be anything in it.
I don’t think I’ve lost my entire music library forever What I think has happened is that the process of detaching the SSD, attaching it to the Mac and then reattaching it to the NUC has confused the NUC and that I might need to reformat the drive to sort it out. My proposed course of action is:
Reattach the SSD to the Mac and copy all the music onto the Mac’s hard drive
Then attach it to the NUC again and format the drive (although I’m not sure how to do this bit, to be honest)
Once the drive is showing up again in Finder etc, I’ll then move all the music back onto the SSD and then link to it from within Roon
Then any subsequent rips I’ll move onto the SSD via Finder over the network, if that makes sense.
Does this all sound like it might solve the issue? As you might be able to tell, I’m not super-technical so forgive me if this is all screamingly obvious…
I don’t think you have to reformat and copy the files back. In any case, let’s investigate some things before doing anything rash:
What is the file system type on that SSD, the NTFS file system of Windows possibly? (The Mac’s Disk Utility should be able to tell you).
When you detached it, did you shut down the NUC before doing so or did you pull the USB cable while the NUC was running?
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
3
Just as a FYI, I deleted your duplicate thread on the same subject.
One thread per problem is all that is required and as you have some assistance on this one already let’s keep it all here.
Thank you for your cooperation.
I can’t see how to identify the file system type. Disk Utility can’t see it.
Rather embarrassingly, I didn’t shut down the NUC before removing the SSD.
EDIT: Following a quick Google I’ve just tried ‘mount’ in terminal and it seems to be suggesting it’s smbfs… if I’m reading the right bit of gobbledegook!)
Wait a minute, I think I misread your original post. After re-reading, am I understanding correctly that your Mac can see the contents (as you copied your rips to it) but the NUC can’t? That’s weird.
If the Mac can see the contents, then it’s not an NTFS disk, and in this case the unplugging-without-shutdown probably didn’t hurt.
(Though if the Mac can see it, I don’t understand why Disk Utility wouldn’t. But maybe not all that important in this case).
If it’s only the NUC that can’t see it, maybe we should move this whole thread to Support so that Roon support staff can take a look at your ROCK logs
My Mac could see the SSD contents when the SSD was directly attached to it but after re-attaching it to the NUC it couldn’t see anything in the Storage folder. Does that make sense?
I took the liberty and moved this to Support. Maybe the support people see hints in the logs when this thread reaches the top of their queue next week. Or someone else has an idea.
But maybe make sure that the USB cable isn’t broken and plugged in, and try another USB port on the NUC. Just to cover all bases
Unfortunately, it seems that your music files were lost when the SSD was connected to your Mac. macOS doesn’t support the Linux ext4 file system used by ROCK, and when the drive was attached it likely reinitialized or altered the partition structure, making the data inaccessible to your NUC.
One important reason this happened: removing the SSD while the NUC was powered on (a hot unplug) can leave an ext4 filesystem in a “dirty” state — meaning there were pending writes or the journal wasn’t flushed and the filesystem metadata became inconsistent. When a disk is in that state, mounting it on another OS (or the OS trying to repair/initialize it) can further change the partition table or overwrite metadata, which effectively destroys the original ext4 structure.
For the future, please do not physically move the SSD between the NUC and a Mac. Instead use the ROCK network share (in Finder: Go → Connect to Server → smb://<ROCK IP address>/Data) to copy or add files. This avoids filesystem incompatibility and prevents corruption.
If you’d like, we can still attempt data recovery using Linux tools (e.g., testdisk / photorec), but the chances depend on whether the disk was reformatted or overwritten after the hot unplug.
Oh my word…that is alarming. I’m hoping (praying) that I’ll have an old back-up somewhere but before we get into that, let me clarify that I could still see the files and add to them when I connected the SSD to the Mac. Would the degradation have occurred when the drive was reconnected to the NUC?
The disk was plugged in correctly as far as I could tell. I’ve now shut down the ROCK (didn’t realise you could do that via a web interface…every day’s a school day!) and attached the drive to my work Mac (different machine) and it’s looking like the files are all there. See attached.
I should have added that the files are indeed all present and correct when I look at the drive on my Mac. Which is something of a relief, I don’t mind telling you!
Thanks for the update! This is all good news. I’d maybe make another safe backup of your local files outside of the external drive if you haven’t already - just to be safe.
Feel free to safely de-tach the external drive from your Mac, and then plug it back into your ROCK while it’s shut down.
Then, restart everything through the web UI and verify that Roon Server is running. We’ll enable diagnostics on your Roon Server instance to investigate what might be causing the connection issue.
Once it’s back online, try reconnecting and let us know if by chance everything is working properly.
OK, that’s all done and everything seems to be working fine. So in a nutshell, all I had to do (apart from not messing about with the SSD in the first place) was to turn the NUC off, reattach the drive and turn it back on again.
My only slight concern now is that when I explore the SSD folder structure through Finder, it gives me the dreaded spinning Loading catherine wheel without actually showing me the files. So maybe it’s not entirely working as it should…
What I think has happened is that the process of detaching the SSD, attaching it to the Mac and then reattaching it to the NUC has confused the NUC and that I might need to reformat the drive to sort it out. My proposed course of action is:
