Third Partition??

moosepr

So i have been thinking (dangerous i know!!) the biggest issue i have had supporting my TinyPi builds, is teaching people how to copy roms and such onto the EmulationStation install. The first limitation is of course getting them to get the device on the internet, then i have disabled samba to help with the boot time!! so you can use win-scp and such to get round it, but that is a bit of a bit step for the non-tech savvy, so i have a plan

if we add a third partition into the mix, formatted to FAT32, and mounted to the home folder on the pi. That way the user will be able to just pop the SD card into any computer, and be able to access the roms and config folders for easy updating.

the issue will of course be making sure the EXT4 partition is big enough for normal operations like updates and such, while making it so the FAT32 partition can be as big as possible to make sure there is space for roms

Anyone thought of this already? or am i thinking garbage?

mitu

That's not a bad idea, but I see 2 possible problems with it:

Windows will prompt the user to 'fix' the linux partition and it might get inadvertently re-formatted. If this is a repeated operation, something like this is more likely to happen in the long run.
The /boot partition will also be visible and it might confuse users which will either copy there the rom or freak out that the rom folders have disappeared.

I'm wondering if the 2 issues might be solved by marking the partitions as 'hidden', so Windows would not bother to check them.

On the technical side, the configuration folder (/opt/retropie/configs) has some symlinks to the /home/pi folder (RA own configs, Emulationstation config folder), those might not work if you're mounting the whole /home/pi folder as a separate (FAT32) partition. This can also be solved by only mounting the ROMs folder (/home/pi/RetroPie/roms) from the 3rd partition.

moosepr

@mitu yeah that could work, if someone is savvy enough to be wanting to change configs and such, then they would in theory have the know-how to get the pi online and ssh in anyway. I might have to have a play, see what happens