@tango Thanks for this comprehensive writeup. That's the spirit of a community. :)

For all coming accross this post: This guide works only for Rpi 3B+ (Note the +).

For other models suppporting USB mass storage boot see prerequites here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md

@colstar yeah that's understandable if you are new to this. My point is you don't even have to use a UBS stick to transfer ROMs. Can do it all with your PC and its not even a very technical process. But if you like the USB way that's cool

@tango said in SDCard Unreliable - Move all RP to USB card? Or fix SD?:

Or does it do that because I have no boot sector or boot programs on my USB stick?

If you haven't programmed the OTP bit for USB boot, the Pi will always boot from sdcard.

Sorry, we don't support 3rd party images or pre-sold 'consoles' . You'll have to ask the vendor/seller for support.

@mindwave

Win32DiskImager is what I use as well to backup my RPi images.

This site has an easy to follow guide: https://howchoo.com/g/nmexndnlmdb/how-to-back-up-a-raspberry-pi-on-windows

@busywait That did it. Thanks!

@mitu Ok, thanks)

@mitu Ok I will have a look on that. Thank you

@chrisw99 said in SD card write cycles:

It was more a generic question about the lifecycle of an SD card if it's in a Pi as there always seems to be stuff being written even when idle.

Things get written to logs when events happen - it's not an issue to cause excessive write tearing. Unless you have a problem which gets logged continuously in the logs (such as under-voltage warnings), the normal operation on a Pi will not negatiely impact the negatively the sdcard lifetime.

You could configure logging to RAM instead of persistent storage (with something like Log4Ram) if you wish.

@mitu

Thank you Mitu

Just thought about it since you mentioned the USB3 methods of storing and backing up roms

Thank you for the tip

@YFZdude

Thank you for advice

Also

Really appreciate the advice from everyone who commented on this post

Thank you all

I will try to be the most careful as I can while shopping online ;)

@djshenanigans You can use the File Manager (from the RetroPie system in EmulationStation) to copy your ROMs to the SD card, from the USB stick. Just rename the retropie-mount folder on the USB, so it's not automatically mounted over the ROMs folder by RetroPie. After plugging in the USB stick, the files there should be available under /media/usb0.

@xtv said in Read psx roms off SD card & USB:

One solution could be splitting this into two subdirectories, like A-J and K-Z, one of them being a symlink to the USB drive.

That would be a simple visual solution to "hide" the separate-location structure. You could also split it on release year or franchise to help hide the fact.

@pojr Cool, glad you got it! I meant to mention that one as well as I has tried it, but it didn't fix
the issue for me.

@mitu I wanted to circle back, you were right. In the terminal, I typed df -h / this got me the info on the SD card. So, that resulted in 118gb Space, 113gb used, 0 Space available, 100% used up.

I thought this was odd, my SD card should be close to 128gb. Anyways, I deleted a bunch of games, etc and ran the same command and got the following:

118gb space, 103gb used, 10gb space avail., used 92%

So like I said, you were right!

Thanks!

Also, what's Ether? Never heard of it. I used Win32DiskImager only because Etcher doesn't work on Windows Vista. I hate Win32. I need some sort of easy alternative like Etcher.