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

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!