Multiple usb sticks

[jwbmonk]

Re: Question about using multiple USB sticks

How do you use two usb sticks at the same time?

[mitu]

@jwbmonk Use the procedure for using 1 usb stick and repeat for the 2nd stick. Make sure the 2nd one has a different mountpoint than the 1st, otherwise you'll only see the contents of the 2nd stick.
Use the procedure in the docs from https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/#manual-mount, leaving aside the instruction about moving the ROMs to the USB stick for the 2nd stick, since you probably want to do that only for the 1st stick only.

[jwbmonk]

@mitu Sorry if this is a dumb question but how do you change the mount point? is that what the guide refers to as a UUID?

[mitu]

@jwbmonk No, the mountpoint is the folder where the contents of the stick will appear, in the docs it's /home/pi/RetroPie , the 2nd field in the /etc/fstab file that you have to add.

[jwbmonk]

@mitu I'm still not quite getting it lol, I will have to read over the guide a few times I guess

[mitu]

@jwbmonk If you're new to Linux, then you might start with https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2014/05/how-to-mount-a-usb-flash-disk-on-the-raspberry-pi/ , it's a step by step guide that applies to the PI.

It should give you a better idea about the 'mount' command and how it's used, it will be easier to understand the guide after having a better idea of how things work.

[jwbmonk]

@mitu Thanks i'll take a look

[jwbmonk]

@mitu Ok I think I get it now, my only other question would be does the mount point follow a certain naming convention for retropie to recognize?

[mitu]

@jwbmonk It depends on what you want to do with the 2 sticks. The docs I referenced earlier would make the stick hold all the ROMs, but what do you have in mind for the 2nd one ?

[jwbmonk]

@mitu I want the second one to hold more roms, I want to put my psx collection on the second stick as its a much larger size and all my other roms on the first

[mitu]

@jwbmonk In this case, after you configured the 1st stick as mentioned in the docs, plug in the 2nd one and find out the UUID of the stick - skipping all the other instructions about moving the /home/pi/RetroPie folder contents to the disk. For the 2nd stick instead of mounting the stick to /home/pie/RetroPie/roms, you can use /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/psx as the mount point.
So, assuming you found out the UUID for both sticks, in your /etc/fstab file you add the lines

# Line for the 1st stick
UUID=<UUID1>  /home/pi/RetroPie      vfat    nofail,user,uid=pi,gid=pi 0       2

#Line for the 2nd stick
UUID=<UUID2>  /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/psx     vfat    nofail,user,uid=pi,gid=pi,noauto 0       2

Now, the problem with using 2 sticks at once is that the order in which they're mounted is not guaranteed by the order they appear in the /etc/fstab file, so the system might try to mount the 2nd stick before the 1st, which is not what we want. That's why the lines above do notautomatically mount the 2nd stick (i.e. the noauto option).

What you need to do is add the explicit mount command for the 2nd stick in the /etc/rc.local file:

mount /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/psx

So, you can try and experiment: make your 1 USB stick work just like indicated in the docs (don't forget to disable the USB rom service !) check that all your ROM/games work from the stick.
Then configure the 2nd stick by adding the line in the /etc/fstab and using the mount command above to see if the PSX games on the 2nd stick appear correctly.
Once you're confident everything is fine, add the mount command in /etc/rc.local and try to reboot the system to see that every game/ROM works correctly.

[jwbmonk]

@mitu Thanks the first stick is already working fine I'm gonna try and add the second when I get home I will post the results

[jwbmonk]

@mitu I never ended up doing this I realized I'm an idiot and I could just transfer all the other ROMs to the SD card lol thanks for the help though