From the manual from the person that built the pie for me:

"Both items are equally as important to back up. The SD card contains the “system” and the hard drive contains the “games.”"

@Thorr69 said in Why Does My HDD Not Always Load?:

@AlphaBetaPie said in Why Does My HDD Not Always Load?:

@Ashpool said in Why Does My HDD Not Always Load?:

@AlphaBetaPie said in Why Does My HDD Not Always Load?:
However, I may be missing something here.

Yes, yes you are. He said to plug it into a powered USB hub. And when you fire up the system, POWER UP THE HUB FIRST. Then turn on your pi.

This ensures that your HDD is already fully powered and spinning before your Pi tries to access it.

Ah, I see! That is great info to know.

However, while that is useful, I may have found the real culprit in the meantime.

I originally replaced my default USB cable with a shorter one to decrease the excess clutter around the Pie itself. I wondered if maybe this cable was not performing as it should. So I reverted back to the stock cable and it has yet to replicate this issue. So seems like it was a signal thing vs a power thing. So just leaving this here for anyone who might face a similar problem in the future.

Thanks all!

@mitu said in I Need to Go BIG For My Next Build:

@alphabetapie said in I Need to Go BIG For My Next Build:

[FAILED] failed to start usbmount@dev-sda.service

The error is benign and can be ignored. /dev/sda is the whole disc device, so it cannot be processed (since it has not filesystem). The partition you created is on /dev/sda1 (1st partition on disc) and it works fine, as you already noticed.

Thanks a lot for confirming! Much appreciated.

@mitu alright thanks ill give that a shot

@Ashpool
Guess thats it
its 2.5 connect usb only

FAT32? That is only the Partition with the Bootloader, the regular OS Partitions are Ext4.
Maybe this here Berryterminal: Adding your own custom operating systems to the menu could be useful.

@2fst4u To be fair, this is the most common problem when dealing with a Pi Zero - the hub. Glad you got it working.

Please fill in the information asked in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first about your system.

Great, thanks for the help will give it a go, I’ll post back how I’ve got on or if I need some help lol

Cheers again

I've been on a journey to get retropie rootfs booting from an NFS drive connected to (and served by) another Pi. Not quite there, yet - but oh so close.

You can see my journey at https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=212242.

Once I have it all running properly (it is, now, but not straight from a fresh boot) I'll provide proper documentation.

The USB hub is internal, I can't change it (well, i could maybe). And I don't use that NESpi case, its a different one called NES case, which even don't look like an NES case (its black). Maybe same poor quality issue. I even don't use the fan, because it is loud as a jet. And that pcb is rated to be used with 4 usb connections plus the fan. Not sure if its a power issue.

For now, I will not try more as I don't want mess it up again. I will get a bigger sd card (from 32gb to maybe 128gb, or at least 64gb) and its all done.

For default controller mapping here is a link:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/RetroArch-Configuration#default-joypad-hotkeys

Oops mitu just beat me to it

@moco Seems like a good price. It looks to be a fairly compact enclosure. Will this be hidden inside your project?

I think you have to take a somewhat "disposable" approach to these projects. I have my system running completely off a large SDcard, and I have to live with the possibility (although I have not had an issue) that the card could get corrupted and require me to reformat. With safe shutdown etc. I should be able to avoid that, and you with your external drive may overcome that problem altogether, but as my project has evolved I have always considered all of the configuration, ROMs and artwork to be just the "working" versions in my arcade cabinet, knowing that I will eventually want to re-image. To that end, everything is stored in a network archive so I can rebuild if I need to.

I hope it works for you. If I do the HDD route, I might simply try to repurpose one of my bare 3.5" HDDs by adding a USB interface. The thing I like about thumb drives though is no noise, lower heat, and no moving parts to fail.

Hey guys,

Thanks for the response. I formatted the SD card again and reloaded retropie. Still had the same problem so what I did was removed my wireless playstation controllers and plug my hard drive in a different usb port (because it wouldn't boot up without the hard drive in) this time I had a different error message. I turned it off, unplugged the usb then turned it back on without the USB and then everything was back to normal. It's bizarre, but I'm glad everything is back to normal.

Thanks for your help!

So, the power source is really such an important point that in no case should not be neglected? And let's say if I want to use an external HD that does not have its own power, then it is desirable to buy a USB hub with its own power supply? But even so, I still can not understand what would be so terrible if the external HD is powered by the pi itself.

Thanks again. Success so far.

I redid the mounting for the external hard drive and now have it mounted to the Retropie folder and it appears to work correctly. If I have the drive plugged in on boot, the emulators show up and games work. If I boot without the drive, only the Retropie menu comes up.

I did have to manually set up the BIOS, retropiemenu, roms, and splashscreens folders and subfolders up in the root of the hard drive through Windows. I assume that is normal in this case (and hopefully I did't miss anything).

I have a few more folder questions:

Is the BIOS folder set up in the same way as the rom folder in that there are subfolders for each emulator (such as psp, psx, sega32x) or do you just toss all the bios files in that folder? I see that the images by default are located in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images. Any suggestions on what to look at to store the images on the hard drive instead? Using Sselphs scraper perhaps?

Also, what triggers retropie to generate a new gamelist.xml? Is it when the scraper is run?

@Righto123
Check here:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7780/loading-roms-from-usb-harddrive

UUID info here:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/4768/run-roms-from-usb-flash-drive-instead-of-microsd-card-manual/5

And there's so more info here (more for flash drives than HDDs):
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive