I have been using a Seagate 8tb external hard drive for about a year now formatted to exfat and I'm constantly pounding on that thing and I have yet to have any files corrupt or any issues. Everyone's mileage may be different but I've at least had very good luck using exfat.

@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.

You can install the desktop on the RetroPie image and other packages (including a browser) so you can operate directly from the Pi. See here.

Does the RAW backup then also occupy as much space as there is data on the SD card or is it then a 1:1 image of the entire SD card and its capacity?

If you look in the topic for the utility I pointed, there's an explanation on how much space does it take - it will initially create a full block copy of your sdcard, then shrink it to the actual size of used blocks. So you need to have enough space on your USB disc for a full sdcard copy.

There's no option in RetroPie for this configuration, but you can use gparted and shrink the 2nd partition (which is ext4) to make room for a 3rd partition. Since gparted is a Linux application, you'll need a Linux system to run it - you can use the Gparted LiveCD to run it on a system that doesn't have Linux installed.

The easier solution would be to use an USB drive - which you can format as exFAT - and put your ROMs on it: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/.

@sgtjimmyrustles It wouldn't really work on RetroPie as easily imho. Recalbox system is a fixed size. RetroPie is a full OS which needs to sit on the ext4 filesystem and can grow. We wouldn't know how much to split between the system and roms partitions - not everyone's use case is the same. Some people might want to add lots of addition stuff to the OS.

Even if this was an initial configurable setting on first boot, I don't really like the idea sorry.

Also, I think it's easy enough to transfer ROMs. You can copy directly if you install an ext4 filesystem on windows.

I will try that, thanks! Sorry for being ignorant and reading the rules correctly..

On a somewhat related note: will retropie support CRT / 240p right out of the box?

@Shira See https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/#configure-fstab-to-automatically-mount-usb-drive for more information about permanent mounts via /etc/fstab.

@mitu Thank you, I'll do that.

@jonnykesh said in Error formatting 64Gb USB:

@landyvlad Windows is a pain the the ass. Use a third party tool like this https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/pls/index.html or this https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/best-fat32-format-tool.html

The former didn't give me any options and formatted the usb stick (which it said was an sd card) as ex-FAT rather than FAT32.

The second easeus worked fine and quickly. Cheers

@AlmightyHeretic

Try following this guide here to mount your drive.

properly-mount-usb-storage-raspberry-pi

That should solve most of your problems.