Games on USB-Drive are not refreshed

RetroChip

Hello together,

I registered new to the forum and open a topic because I had a problem where I didn't find an answer after searching.

My aim is that I would like to put my Roms on a USB-drive without they are transferred by Retropie 4.3 to the SD-Card. So the whole collection is on the USB and /home/pi/RetroPie folder is empty (except perhaps with some empty dummy folders with the structure of the USB-Drive. This does not disturb me).
I thought with the Running ROMs from the USB-Drive method this would be possible, but the EmulationStation does not behave how I would like to. If I put new ROMs ,after renaming my folder from retropie to retropie-mount on the USB-drive, to the folders on the USB-drive the EmulationStation does not detect them (even after restarting the Station or the raspberry pi system).

I don't know if this behavior was intended by the tutorial in order to have a definite games collection, which will not be updated. But I could not imagine it.
I tried both methods: The automatic and the manual one, but both were not successful. If I use the manual method, retropie has troubles to find any devices. Maybe it is because I am using a NTFS harddrive instead of a FAT32 but his should not be an issue, as long as Retropie can access my drive (in a normal mode), should it? Furthermore this drive is not empty since I have other files on it as well, but as long as the retropie-mount folder is existing this should not be a problem?
Maybe the problem could be, that I first created a retropie folder on the USB-Drive and not a retropie-mount from the start? Does it confuse Retropie? I did this because it has been explained in some other tutorials.

My system:
Raspberry PI 3B
Power Supply used:
Retropie Version: 4.3
Build from: PINN (To SD-Card)
Controler used: Microsoft SideWinder

Thank you for your help.

Kind Regards

RetroChip

Jono

Hi RetroChip,

Have you enabled the USB Service?

jonnykesh

@retrochip Honestly? The quick answer is to start fresh and rather than building on PINN, use the official image.

jonnykesh

@jono USB service is to transfer ROMs, not run them from the USB.

RetroChip

I think, that PINN is not the problem, since it is not running on PINN, but as a normal operating system. Furthermore, I updated the system. So it should nearly be on the most recent version number. I think, that the tutorial should be usable with every 4.3 retropie version.

dankcushions

can you give an example of the full path on your usb drive (including file name and extension) of a file that is not detected?

RetroChip

Hey, sorry for my late answer. I was on vacatation and had no access to it.
The behavior is not limited to a special ROM, it is occuring always. An example is:

/media/usb/retropie-mount/roms/gb/Pokemon - Blue Edition.gb

As far as I understood, the ROM is called on the USB-Drive and therefore is not required on the SD-Card anymore.
But RetroPi is always copying the ROM to the "internal" SD-Card:
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/gb

And if the file is there, then it is detected by RetroPi. But I delete it file (only the file not the folder) on the internal drive, since this behavior is not desired by me. (And it should not be? Or did I understand something wrong?)

dankcushions

@retrochip how are you determining the games are on the internal SD card? because the automatic process uses symbolic links - if you viewed your file structure within retropie it would appear if the game was located in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/gb/, but it is physically on the USB drive.

RetroChip

Hi, yes this would be great if these files were symbolic links. But I am doubting it, since I was verifying where the symbolic link is going:

If I type in the command shell:
readlink -f ~/RetroPie/roms/gb/Pokemon\ -\ Blue\ Edition.gb

I got the output:

/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/gb/Pokemon - Blue Edition.gb

In my opinion it could be, that it is a symbolic link to itself, where I think that this means it is not a real symbolic link but the file itself.
For a symbolic link I would expect:

-> /media/usb/retropie-mount/roms/gb/Pokemon - Blue Edition.gb

(a link to the USB drive)

By the way, I read the tutorial in the thread creation again and I realized in the last section the small sentence:

Now transfer ROMs either directly to the USB drive, or via any of the usual methods (aside from using the automatic USB copy, obviously!)

In my opinion, this means that a direct copy to the USB-drive is not able to work with the "automatic method", but only with the manual method, doesn't it?

dankcushions

@retrochip it might be your NTFS drive. the guide states fat32.

Now transfer ROMs either directly to the USB drive, or via any of the usual methods (aside from using the automatic USB copy, obviously!)

In my opinion, this means that a direct copy to the USB-drive is not able to work with the "automatic method", but only with the manual method, doesn't it?

i don't understand you, here. if your links aren't working, it doesn't matter if the automatic copy has happened or not. you have problems before that.

RetroChip

Perhaps, I expressed myself a bit unclearly:
The links are working, if the ROM is in bother folders (/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/gb/ and /media/usb/retropie-mount/roms/gb/)
So the games are updated after a restart of the emulation system.
If I delete a rom file on one both folders, then the ROM in the other folder is deleted as well after a certain time. It doesn't matter if I do it on the SD-Card or the USB-Drive. So there is some kind of a syncronization process running. But the interesting question is, if the file in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/gb/ is really a symbolic link to /media/usb/retropie-mount/roms/gb/. Then everything would be perfect ;) But as stated before, I doubt it because of the output of the readlink command. Unfortuanetly I do not know more about the sync process.
So it could have something to do with the automatic copy or the manual copy. Does anyone know the author who has written the tutorial and could send me some contact details via PM?

ChuckyP

I think you are over-complicating the thought process. It doesn’t “Sync” it only creates a pointer to the rom on your USB Storage.

But there are 2 independent ways to look at this.

You load ROMs from a USB onto the Raspberry Pi from a USB stick. In which case, once that has taken place there is no need for the USB device. The ROMs are now on the SD card.
You RUN ROMs off of the USB device, and the ROMs live on the external device. In this case there will be a “Link” to the external drive data.

RetroChip

Hey, yes I understand. And my question is how do I tell retropie to do as you described in your second point?
Until now I thought it doesn't matter if I use the automatic mount or the manual mount to go your second way.

@dankcushions
I rechecked it with a USB-Drive which is newly formatted with FAT32. I still have the same behavior. (same output for readlink command as before) So it seems to be no problem, that I have a drive with NTFS.

ChuckyP

I have used the Official method of “RetroPie-mount” that you describe and it worked fine for me. But I prefer the Easy-Hax toolkit method. Maybe you will have more success with that.

The thing I like about this is you can keep some ROMs on your SD card (if you want to), while also being able to plug in the External drive and reboot to have access to that as well. Win / Win

dankcushions

@retrochip said in Games on USB-Drive are not refreshed:

. Does anyone know the author who has written the tutorial and could send me some contact details via PM?

i wrote the tutorial :)

i guess i just don’t know what the problem would be. this is basic functionality of retropie and should work ‘out of the box’. it works for me and many others. i don’t know how i can assist you other than if you look at the usb functions in the scripts and work through it line by line.

Clyde

@chuckyp said in Games on USB-Drive are not refreshed:

The thing I like about this is you can keep some ROMs on your SD card (if you want to), while also being able to plug in the External drive and reboot to have access to that as well. Win / Win

Well, there's also the KISS principle – keep it simple, stupid. In this case, that would be having all roms either on the card or on the usb drive.

I understand your desire to adjust the system to your personal preferences, but there is a point where the possible gain is not worth the effort (and that comes from someone who manually set up his usb mount to only some rom folders, but also with over 11 years of Linux experience).

That said, it would be helpful for further help in this matter if you describe your setup method step by step including the exact commands used and config files created/changed. And no, the mere reference to the How-To you used isn't enough.

RetroChip

@dankcushions and @ChuckyP

If you configured your retropie, that you run the ROMs OFF of the USB device, with a symbolic link to the external drive data. Could you please provide the output, what you get if you run the readlink -f command in the /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/ folder for a specific rom file. Then I would at least know how it should look like.

Thank you!

RetroChip

I think I got it now :)

I understood that if I access the subdirectories of /home/pi/RetroPie I always access my USB-drive. The subdirectories are not on the SD-card anymore and everything is on the USB-drive.
I verified it with the following command (for anyone who had the same problems):

df -P /home/pi/RetroPi | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f 1

Output:
/dev/sda1

As you can see here (/dev/sda1) equals my USB-drive:

pi@retropie:/home $ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 7928236 2083396 5419064 28% /
devtmpfs 378828 0 378828 0% /dev
tmpfs 383436 0 383436 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 383436 5460 377976 2% /run
tmpfs 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 383436 0 383436 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p6 58234 21480 36754 37% /boot
/dev/sda1 1953511420 958316104 995195316 50% /media/usb0

So the readfile command is therefore of course always refering to itself.

In total, this is exactly the behavior I would like to :).

Clyde

@retrochip said in Games on USB-Drive are not refreshed:

pi@retropie:/home $ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 7928236 2083396 5419064 28% /
devtmpfs 378828 0 378828 0% /dev
tmpfs 383436 0 383436 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 383436 5460 377976 2% /run
tmpfs 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 383436 0 383436 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p6 58234 21480 36754 37% /boot
/dev/sda1 1953511420 958316104 995195316 50% /media/usb0

Just a little hint; if you put the output in a codeblock, it's much more readable:

pi@retropie:/home $ **df**
Filesystem      1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root         7928236   2083396   5419064  28% /
devtmpfs           378828         0    378828   0% /dev
tmpfs              383436         0    383436   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs              383436      5460    377976   2% /run
tmpfs                5120         4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs              383436         0    383436   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p6      58234     21480     36754  37% /boot
**/dev/sda1**  1953511420 958316104 995195316  50% **/media/usb0**

ChuckyP

@clyde not trying to make things more difficult. Just giving another option in-case he can’t get the official method to work.

In my case I don’t scatter ROMs onto either storage media. I use my hard drive for the CD based games and then when unplugged it still holds all my cartridge systems on the SD Card.