'Ghost' in my machine? Deleting ROM help...

mwhitney

Hey gents - I searched the forums and found a few pointers regarding a proper card, hitting f4 in one's FTP program and going into the code to manually delete files via code prompts.

Here's my scenario:

I uploaded a hundreds of files into my Atari 2600 folder (just as an example). My thinking was I'd try the games and simply delete what I didn't want.
I deleted the games in Filezilla, and realized to get the changes to stick, I had to properly restart the emulation station rather than just killing the power. This seemed to work as of last night - I'd delete files via my laptop/FTP program, restart ES and the changes were saved...
However... today when I restarted the RPi all the games were back.

How can I quickly delete the games and have the changes stick? I've since thought better of it and will just upload the games I know I want (the standard classics) but I need a clean slate to start from.

Thanks in advance!
Mike

zerojay

Your SD card is most likely about to fail entirely. The card puts itself into read-only mode to protect your data long enough for you to pull your data from it before it dies entirely. This cannot be fixed when it happens. You need a new SD card.

mwhitney

@zerojay thanks for the info.

ChuckyP

@mwhitney I delete through the menu. Press select, go to edit metadata and there is an option to delete. If the game still shows after a restart make sure you don’t have parse
gameslist turned on, or it will use whatever is listed in your gamelist.xml file.

mwhitney

Thanks Chuck -

This would be great for one file here and there. I made the mistake of uploading a crap-ton of games but now can't remove them.

If I delete all in FTP and hit refresh, Filezilla shows them as being gone. However, as soon as I restart ES or reboot the entire system, the games are back.

At this point, I'd like to just delete everything I've uploaded and be more selective with what I upload.

Do you know of a quick way to do a batch delete? Can I set permissions to all ROMS within Filezilla to do so, and if so, what should that be? Currently, all are set to '755'.

Thanks in advance -

Clyde

@mwhitney said in 'Ghost' in my machine? Deleting ROM help...:

Do you know of a quick way to do a batch delete?

Doing batch stuff is one of the strenghts of Linux/Retropie's command console that you land in when you quit ES without reboot or shutdown, or when you login via ssh. What do you want to do exactly?

mwhitney

@clyde At this point I'd be happy to just delete all games in a given emulator and then selectively re-upload via FTP.

I got 'greedy' and just dumped 1000s of games via FTP (across the different emulators i.e. Atari 2600, NES etc.), thinking I'd play them / delete them as needed; I didn't realize removing games would be as challenging as it has been.

Realistically, there's probably 10 games max per emulator that I'd consistently play, so getting back to ground zero would be my primary goal.

Thanks.

ChuckyP

@mwhitney if I am going to delete an entire emulators ROMs I would login through either WinScp or Samba shares. I run a windows machine and that gives me access to the ROMs folder and each system folder inside.

mwhitney

@chuckyp Hey Chuck, thanks for the additional info.

I'm on a mac and am running (what I believe to be) a comparable FTP program, Filezilla.

As a note I was able to FTP in and upload games.

The problem comes when deleting. I can remove files from within the FTP program and when I restart Emulation Station, those changes stick.

However, when I 'restart' RPi (not just restart ES), the games show back up as if they are being held in memory and being re-written.

That's the underlying issue I'm having. FTP is logging in and working fine via Filezilla.

zerojay

@mwhitney This is happening because your card is locked for writing because it is likely damaged, as I said. Everything you're mentioning here are symptoms of it.

mwhitney

@zerojay thanks. Any idea what may cause this? The card has very few 'miles' on it. If the card is toast, do you have a recommendation for a replacement? Any steps on how to move forward if I get a new card, i.e. is it just plug and play or do I have to format it / put Rpi onto it? I'm pretty green w/ this stuff. Thanks.

PS - is there any way I can test the SD card on a laptop to see if it is in fact corrupt?

Clyde

@zerojay Hello zerojay, just out of curiosity: Wouldn't such card be recognised by the Linux system as read-only, thus preventing any writing access in the first place?

zerojay

@clyde said in 'Ghost' in my machine? Deleting ROM help...:

@zerojay Hello zerojay, just out of curiosity: Wouldn't such card be recognised by the Linux system as read-only, thus preventing any writing access in the first place?

No, it wouldn't. The cards don't inform the OS of there being any issues which is why it looks like you can write to them and use them but the changes never actually get flushed to the card and are only cached which is wh it looks like your changes are happening only for them to disappear and get reverted when you reboot.

Clyde

@zerojay Thanks, I didn't know that. A shame that the cards don't inform the OS. Too useful a thing to do, I guess. :/

mwhitney

UPDATE: I contacted CanaKit - the guys I bought my kit from and they concur w/ zerojay RE card failure. They are sending me a replacement, pro-bono.

Any tips from the user-side of things on how to prevent this or is it just something that happens for no rhyme / reason?

mitu

@mwhitney Some general advice for keeping you Pi and card as safe as possible

Don't pull the plug on your Pi to stop it, try to shut it cleanly. You can either use the Quit Emulationstation menu or run sudo shutdown -h now from the command line (when you don't have ES available). This will prevent any filesystem and card corruption.
Use a proper power source - make sure it's specced correctly for your Pi model (https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/).

mwhitney

@mitu thanks for the tips!