Should work fine on an SSD. You just have to install manually or use an unofficial build without support. You'll probably gain faster OS boot times.

@JackTaylor said in Retropie saving images in /boot:

However, I have found there is another roms folder on the boot directory, where the images are being sent to when the pi boots.

Not sure why that happens, but it's not from RetroPie. EmulationStation, which is the only RetroPie program started at boot that stays resident, doesn't move images around.

@mitu I found out I had themes and videos saved there, thanks for the help!

@mitu Yeah, when I was searching the pin seem to suggest it was a speed issue, not a mount issue, which is why I overlooked it. So I figured I would just post anyway.

@mitu
Guess I'll just live without packages, thanks man.

Edit:
I got it to work, I managed to install Kodi and steamlink!

You were right it was something with the DNS settings, I changed it to 8.8.8.8 using this guide through terminal and it just immediately worked.

Berryboot hasn't been supported for quite some time by RetroPie and there haven't been any compatible images released for a few years. How did you actually install RetroPie and which version it's installed ?

@lewisdawson1 said in Running RetroPi entirely on USB:

Is there a command i need to use for USB to access its full speed?

No really, just use the USB3 ports on the Pi4.
How are you powering up the disc - does it have its own power or is it just connected to the Pi ? Some USB3 controllers have issues with Linux - check this topic in the Raspberry PI forums and see if your disc/controller are affected by this problem.

@mitu I ended up loading version 4.8 on an sd card and switching my pi’s boot selector to usb default. When PINN adds 4.8 to their lineup I can add it to a project space. Thank you for the help.

@steptoe said in Booting from SD Card with SSD Storage vs full SSD Install:

You DO have to leave the SD card in though, as it reads the boot sequence from the SD card before passing all control to the external SSD or hard drive

No, that's not required on the Pi4.

@loopsheloop said in Cloning SD to SSD in RetroPie?:

...but I'm not sure if these tools are in RetroPie - kind of sounds like a pi OS kind of thing. But maybe I'm wrong! I don't really know anything about Linux but I'm willing to mess around.

RetroPie is built upon RaspiOS Lite, so it should accommodate any program that works on RaspiOS.

You can install the Desktop and then also add the SD Card Copier application to clone your SD card to the M2 disk. There are a few other command line applications like rpi-clone that can be used, you can try one of them as an alternative to installing the desktop and the clone app.

You can use your existing ROMs on the SSD, you just need to mount it first - easiest is from autostart.sh (which you can find at /opt/retropie/configs/all).
Since RetroPie expects each system to be under it's own directory in the roms folder, you should probably bind-mount your ROM folders under the existing system folder. Something like:

# mount the SSD first sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb0 # make sure each system is in the place with mount --bind /media/usb0/NES_Games /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/nes mount --bind /media/usb0/SNES_Games /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes # etc.

You can go without the bind mount steps if you modify the es_systems.cfg, but I think it's easier to map existing folders via mount --bind if the folder names don't match.

The biggest issue IMHO is the filesystem's permissions. Since it's ext4, you'll inherit the existing permissions and you'll probably have issues if the pi user cannot read or write to the ROM folders. By default, in RetroPie save states and game saves (.srm) are saved in the ROM folder. That may pose a problem if the pi user cannot write there, though you can probably change the save location in the global retroarch.cfg file.

@sleve_mcdichael sorry yeah that's what I meant to ask but didn't word it properly lol I'll try this today and see how it goes, and I've no problem shaving a few GB off if it means saving my build lol

@mitu I thought I did exactly that, but I nuked everything and started fresh.

Seems to be working now! I don’t know what I did wrong initially.

Thank you so much.