How to mount just roms folder from external drive

robmcc83

Hi all,
back again with just a quick question.
im using the latest retropie image from your site on my pi3b and have something i would like to achieve but cannot seem to.

I have a external hard drive that i have setup using the wiki for using a external device.
the only problem is i would like to only mount roms from my external drive, but as default following wiki tutorial i have bios, configs, roms and splashscreens on my external drive.

How would i mount just a directory called roms from my ext4 external drive using UUID to retropie so that bios, configs and splashscreens stay on my sd card.

The reason why i want it working this way is because the drive spins down when there is no activity which means thet when i select a game it takes a while to load my launching (loading) images from retrorama as they are now on the external harddrive and its waiting for disk to spin up.
so i would much prefer the them images to stay on the sd card as i assume that if the roms are the only files on the drive, the launching (loading) screen would just stay on that little longer as it waits for the drive to spin up, and that i can live with :)
Also the spalshscreen does not work as it appears to want to load the splash before the drive is mounted, so i just get console text until emulationstation loads.

Thanks In advance
Rob

mitu

In order to keep the drive spun down and only mount the ROMs folder, you'll need to

Use the manual method to mount your external drive and don't mount the whole /home/pi/RetroPie folder from the external disk partition, just the /home/pi/RetroPie/roms. You have to manually copy the system's folders (under roms) directory on the partition that you mount.
For the artwork to be on the SD card, you'll have to use a scraper that stores the images/video separately from the ROMs folder. By default, Emulationstation's scraper works like this, so if you used another scraper to get the images/videos, you'll have to configure it to not use the ROMs folder.

robmcc83

Hi,
Thanks @mitu for you response yet again :)

Ok so i tried that first off and i also ended up with a lost+found folder in my roms directory.
So what im trying to achieve is having a folder called roms and then mounting that to home/pi/Retropie
Now i know how to do that the old way as in mounting dev/sda1/roms but nowadays we all use UUID so thats where im confused as to how to mount it that way.

All my artwork is done with universal xml scraper and is all stored in configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images so thats all good.

Thanks

mitu

@robmcc83 said in How to mount just roms folder from external drive:

Hi,
Thanks @mitu for you response yet again :)

Ok so i tried that first off and i also ended up with a lost+found folder in my roms directory.

That's normal, any Linux formatted partition has that folder.

So what im trying to achieve is having a folder called roms and then mounting that to home/pi/Retropie

You can't mount a folder from partition, you have to mount the partition first. You can mount it in a separate folder and then use a bind-mount to graft the roms folder in place. Something like

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/myusb
mount -o bind /mnt/myusb/roms /home/pi/RetroPie/roms

Now i know how to do that the old way as in mounting dev/sda1/roms but nowadays we all use UUID so thats where im confused as to how to mount it that way.

It's explained in the docs.

robmcc83

Perfect.

Thank you so much, ill have a read and figure it out from there.

Rob

robmcc83

hi @mitu
I know its been a while but ive only just got round to having a play around with this.

the above you told me to do works perfect but when i restart it no longer binds my directory to my roms folder.
My network drive is setup to automount with the autostart.sh
do i also just add the bind command to the autostart.sh or is there a better way.

Thanks
Rob

Efriim

One could use /etc/fstab to mount a network drive replacing the use of autostart.sh~
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/178187/how-to-edit-etc-fstab-properly-for-network-drive

and external hard drive
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive