@windg Trying to learn. Never tried fstab before. Didn't realize how dangerous it is....
Decided to bail on exFAT. My guess is it doesn't work?
Also decided I didn't want any more pain :)
so ext4 it is
UUID="8787d0f4-f4ab-4eb7-bbb1-ea77b5b2ea41" /home/pi/RetroPie ext4 nofail,defaults 0 0
Working fine with this.
The main thing that surprised me is I can't boot into linux at all if it can't find the drive. Maybe nofail is a good idea for ALL fstab external drive entries. Dunno. Maybe that only works with ext4 and not vfat?
I'm all set now. Thx.