Loading roms from USB harddrive

LaneG22

I wanted to load my roms from the 500 Gb hardrive I bought but it says on any forum I can find that i need to format it to FAT32 but since it is over 30Gb I can't do that what do I need to do.

joyrider3774

i'm using retropie toolkit to use my pidrive (1 tb) drive..

see

this has some benefits :

you can change sd card image roms stay the same
you got localroms (on sd) and on drive (if drive is dsconnected you see the local roms , i think if a drive is connected they show both at the same time but i did not test this as i have no roms on my sd card)
drive is ntfs and mounted read only but some emulators like some mame versions normally save configs in the rom directory this poses no problem as they save it now in the local roms directory so input / configurations still got saved even though the drive is mounted as ntfs read only
drive has to be read only and can contain other data (personal documents).
you can have multiple drives / usb sticks with other romsets that you can connect and disconnect, roms will show up.
faster to transfer your romsets since you copy them to the drive on your pc

do note your pi needs to be connected to the internet to set it up although if you look at the cmd / batch files you can see the url on wich sh script it downloads and you can probably run it manually withouth needing an internet connection. If you have changed default password for your pi user or created a new user edit the cmd / files to adopt for this. It basically connects to your pi using putty / ssh, download the sh script using curl and executes. The reason it probably works this way is if the script gets updated for whatever reason your always using the lastest version, but can be easily run offline as well i guess
the connection is only needed to download / excute the script once it's set up internet connection is no longer needed

i have no problems with this system and it works perfect for me

wilenek

Format the external drive with guiformat

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm

LaneG22

@joyrider3774 I am doing this but when i double click expand to hardrive it can't find my pi even though I am connected to it via putty
What should I do?

joyrider3774

@LaneG22 if your connected using putty you can runn the commands from the cmd manually more specifically getting the sh script from that url using curl chmodding it and then executing it, that's basically all those cmd files do get a script and run it but if your already logged in the pi using ssh you can do it from there also.

Looking at the cmd (batch) file. this is what you need to execute in ssh
"curl http://eazyhax.com/pitime/expand_to_external_drive.sh | bash" without quotes, your pi needs to be connected to the internet for this to work not just your local home network

LaneG22

@joyrider3774 What is wrong if I get the cannot resolve host easyhax.com error

BuZz

@LaneG22 Did you manually type in the commandline ? copy and pasting it over ssh is easier - it's not easyhax but eazyhax

joyrider3774

@LaneG22

it either means your pi is not connected to the internet (only your local netwerk if you can ssh) or that the website is down. Since it is not down for me i can click on the url and see the script it probably means your pi is not internet connect or blocked somewhere with your rother or something. it could also be that at the moment when you last tried it the website / domain was down so can be related to dns settings as well (on your router) / ISP.

ah and indeed just seeing it now it's not easyhax.com but eazyhax.com the url so mistyped indeed ;) just copy paste the line into putty / ssh you do that by rightclicking on the putty window if yousing that

LaneG22

@joyrider3774 ok I got the link to work but it says that my external drive is not on there and it is not mounting any suggestions? Sorry if this is getting annoying.

joyrider3774

@LaneG22 did you format as NTFS and did you created a piroms folder on it ? if you did not do that it won't recognize the drive only NTFS + needs a piroms folder.

If that's the case are you sure your pi recognizes the drive ? ar there any /dev/sda devices being shown ? if not it could be you don't have enough power to power up your drive (if it's not self powered) if the the hard drive have it's own power supply or you use an usb hub or know you got enough power in your adapter for the pi then it's probably the ntfs / piroms folder that's problem.

For example before i had bought the pidrive i tried a few harddisks i had laying around connected directly to the pi without any special usb hub or with the harddrives having a seperate power supply only one actually worked. And i used the official 3 amp adaptor for my pi.

stuntstein

I like this feature.
Would it be possible to do something similar, but using network connection to a NAS drive instead?

adriansos666

Little off-topic. Do you guys see any difference in the boot speed while having roms on external Drive? I got setup with 128gb USB flash drive and it takes good 5 minutes to get to the emulation station. Same setup run from 64Gb micron SD card (exactly same number of roms, config files and scraped pictures) takes maybe 1.5 min for Pi to get to emulation station.

joyrider3774

i'm using attract mode, starts much faster than emulationstation so can't really tell

jokey carrot

@LaneG22 to get es to pick up roms watch this