Possible to run all roms from USB card and Video Snaps, menus and artwork from SD card?

[pumpkinrat]

Hi Guys,
I read the "Run roms from a USB drive" section and have a question.

I would like to run all my roms from a usb drive, and have all video snaps, artwork and menus run only from the sd card. I have a 32gb sd card so I'd like to use it for all front end related stuff and only use the USB drive for roms. My question is: once all the files are copied over to the USB drive via the Automatic Method (turning on the USB Rom Transfer Service), can I delete the snaps and artwork folders that were transfered to the USB stick? What I'm asking is can the Snaps and artwork run from the SD card without also having to be on the USB drive? Can I delete all content from the other folders on the USB stick except for the folders and files inside "roms"?

If so, would changing paths in the gamelist.xml files be part of it? Any help is truly appreciated. Thanks for your time.

I'm running:
RPI3 ModelB
Emulation Station

[Clyde]

I don't have any first-hand experience with the automatic method, but if it does the same as the manual method, the usb drive is being mounted onto the directory /home/pi/Retropie (in short ~/Retropie), overlaying everything that's in this directory and its subdirectories on the SD card. Thus, all data in that directory on the SD card becomes unavailable "under" the mount. So for your intention, some manual work is needed.

You have essentially two options: a) mount only the rom folders from the USB drive, or b) put the artwork in another place "above" ~/Retropie where it's not overlaid by the usb mount. Both methods require editing of the gamelist.xml. Mind that a) may also require the relocation of the artwork/videos if it's located in the standard place inside the rom folders. But you'll have to scrape only from the console with the proper options from that point on.

edit: I forgot c) re-scrape all data with Selph's Scraper from the console with non-standard paths for the artwork. This will also re-generate the gamelist.xml automatically. Since the scraper ignores already-present artwork, the scraping shouldn't take too long if you copy your existing artwork to the new location.

Choose one and we can try to help you doing this. In advance, please show us your /etc/fstab where all automounts should be listed. You can show its content in the Retropie console via the command cat /etc/fstab. Please put it in a code block for better readability. You might expect some delay in our help due to the holidays, though. :)

By the way, do you have any experience in Linux? It determines the level of explanation you'll need for some things.

[pumpkinrat]

Hi Clyde,

Thanks for the reply. I've decided to test a few things out and see if I can get it going on my own. If I do, I'll post how I did it here. If not, I'll post the specific info you asked for above.

Thanks again.