Games aren't always detected from USB connected SSD

sad_muso

I have a Crucial MX300 275GB SSD drive and have used retropie-mount. It seems that every time I unplug the drive to copy files across on my PC then it back in (from the Pi being off first!) it's a gamble whether the ROMS show up. Usually I can restart ES/system, but this time after multiple reboots it still isn't showing.

UPDATE: After leaving it for a while and then restarting system they suddenly showed up. Looks like something is happening silently that eventually catches up. There was no SSD activity during this time. Also seems that even though retropie-mount worked, there are still ROMS on the SD card, as when SSD game weren't detected I could still see a few...

Pi Model: 4 B 4GB
Power Supply: LABISTS Raspberry Pi 4 5.1V 3A
RetroPie Version: 4.6
Built From: RetroPie website image (md5: 9154d998cba5219ddf23de46d8845f6c)
USB Devices connected: 2.0: Wired keyboard / Plugable USB Bluetooth 4.0 adapter, 3.0: External SSD drive
Controller used: 8bitdo SFC30 / 8bitdo Lite

sad_muso

Okay, it would seem that after rebooting I often will not get my SSD ROMS. Seems to be intermittent. Any suggestions welcome :( I can't even see the SSD drive in media/usb or usb0, but it was there earlier. Just tried multiple reboots and changing USB 3.0 ports. Help!

EDIT: I turned Pi off, turned on again and SSD ROMS didn't show up. There was SSD activity for about 2 minutes and once it settled I did an ES reboot and suddenly the SSD kicked to life and loaded all the ROMS. Are there some checks I can do to determine the root cause?

mitu

You can look at the USB disc detection when it's plugged in.
Run dmesg and look at the USB messages, you can also run

systemctl status usbmount@dev-sda1.service

to see how the auto-mounting progresses. How is your disc formatted ?

sad_muso

@mitu Thanks, I'll try running that tonight and see what it shows. By the way, I'm using the ORICO USB 3.0 caddy which people have confirmed to work with the Pi 4, so that shouldn't be an issue.

I formatted the drive in Windows 10 which doesn't offer FAT32 as an option for this size of drive, so I had to use a 3rd Party tool to get it to format as FAT32. But the weird thing here is that the issue is intermittent - once I finally get it to randomly see the drive it works perfectly until the next time I boot. Just need to get it working consistently

sad_muso

Okay, just did a system reboot and all ROMS are not showing again. I ran systemctl status usbmount@dev-sda1.service and the output was as follows:

Loaded: loaded (/lib/systems/system/usbmount@.service; static; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since The 2020-06-16 00:17:42 BST; 3mins 1s ago
Process: 768 ExecStart=/usr/share/usbmount/usbmount add (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
Main PID: 768 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

retropie systems[1]: Failed to start usbmount@dev-sda1.service

I'm going to try rebooting now until the ROMS appears. This is so strange!

UPDATE: Rebooted twice to no avail, then decided to leave it 5 minutes. I then check media/usb0 and could suddenly see the retropie-mount folder. I restarted ES and they all loaded in fine. So it would seem that there is a significant delay between powering on and the USB drive actually being fully detected, almost as though it's having to scan through and detect each ROM (I have a lot). Is this a known issue? Could it be to do with the way in which I setup the drive (I only had 1 ROM per system when I first hooked up the drive, but all folders were successfully copied over to the retropie-mount folder. I then plugged drive back into PC to dump the rest of the ROMS on there)? I should also note that the usbromservice is currently enabled - is that right or should that only be enabled for the drive initialisation?

mitu

@sad_muso said in Games aren't always detected from USB connected SSD:

I'm going to try rebooting now until the ROMS appears. This is so strange!

Try updating the usbromservice package if you haven't run any update recently.

Run dmesg when it happens and post the messages regarding the USB mount, there should be some hints on why the drive fails to mount.

corezon

@mitu This is still an issue. Even after updating, the usbmount service may work one boot and then fail on a reboot. I have noticed that when it fails, I can ssh in and manually restart the service at which point it will mount everything appropriately.

It's really intermittent.

I'm running a Pi4 built from the latest official image and everything was updated yesterday.

mitu

@corezon Check this topic in the Raspberry Pi forums and see if the symptoms match your situation.
If not, try adding a delay before EmulationStation starts so that the disk has enough time to be detected.

corezon

@mitu So I tried that just now it actually caused a 20 second delay in the start up process. So I reverted the changes and I've actually just disabled the usbmount services manually and added a line in fstab to mount /dev/sda1 as a work around. Now it boots normally every time.