Please try to add the recommended information: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

Also, check your roms files, they must have one of this extensions : .cue .cbn .chd .img .iso .m3u .mdf .pbp .toc .z .znx ,
more here: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Playstation-1/

@mitu I just check it, doesn't work that way.

@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!

@soulfunkdjx

Nice !

Good luck with building it up.

Looks like a good use case for git on LAN? You can tag or branch your config sets rolled out for other machines than yours. Later merge all your latest and greatest changes from your machine into the friends' branches from time to time. If something breaks you can easily go back in time.

@mortalwombat cheats in fbneo: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/27826/mame-2003-question-regarding-lucky-and-wild/13?_=1612257367323

samples in fbneo: i’ve provided you with the link on how to use them and it specifically refers to donpachi: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/lr-fbneo/#samples. if you’re now talking about mame2003 - we weren’t talking about that romset before! please be specific.

mame2003 sample instructions are available on the mame2003 docs page: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/lr-mame2003/#samples

Did you also enable the service after installing it ?

Interesting reading. Which systems that the Pi4 can emulate would actually be affected by the read speed that USB2 or SD cards can deliver?

I usually transfer new games from my phone or my PC so my WI/FI and Ethernet speeds would probably be the limiting factor for writing speed for me.

@mitu
After reinstalling everything seems to work fine. Will test for a few days now. Thanks for the assistance.

@mitu Actually, I meant their physical size, 😊 but their smaller storage size makes backups and upgrades more practical, too. That said, SDHC officially goes up to 32 GB, but there are much bigger "SDHC" cards out there, of which some are said to work in a Pi, so …

I'm using a 32 GB card for my Retropie system and an external ssd for the roms. For my backup, I plug both of them into my PC running Kubuntu Linux (the card via a usb adapter), mount the ssd into the roms directory of the sd, and then backup the whole directory structure like it exists on my Pi. Thus, I do not benefit from the sd card's smaller storage size, but I guess my method is fairly uncommon. 😉

@Link You can create a folder for the ROMs on the /media/usb0 partition, copy the contents of /home/pi/RetroPie/roms to it, then symlink /home/pi/RetroPie/roms to the folder on the HDD. Make sure you create a back of /home/pi/RetroPie/roms first, just in case.

Or you can bind mount the folder over /home/pie/RetroPie/roms with something like

mount -o bind /media/usb0/<Folder_name> /home/pi/RetroPie/roms

@mitu said in Slow writing to external HDD:

I don't know why for @pamput it wasn't set (3rd party image ?).

Nah, I probably just fiddle with it and didn't set it back to ON.

Just use the sdcard for /boot and mount rootfs entirely on the hd. Not only will it give you much more storage, but it will also almost eliminate the sdcard failure.

See steptoe's post.

I have 3 Pis, all mounting rootfs on real HDs (one over NFS, and two local), and apart from kernel upgrades, there are no writes to the sdcard (well, except when I play with cmdline.txt and config.txt - but that's just me)

@Muffy correct.

Update:
Started over from square one and rescraped the roms on the hdd. Apparently one of my location paths in the scraper was missing a character or something, because the problem is solved. Images and metadata are now showing for everything. Everyone can quit worrying and stressing now. You may carry on with your lives. ;-)

@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