Load retropie roms off external 4tb HDD?

Stealthbushido

Re: Will RetroPie work with a 4tb External drive?

I've been sitting on a new External 4tb HDD for my pi 4, retropie build for month's. I've looked over countless forums and still haven't found a solution not to mention most of the post's are year's old at this point.

I understand that the format retropie favors can't be over 2tb's I'm just kinda surprised that after all these old posts from 2017 and still there's been no work around yet that I can find. I'm noob to Linux based stuff but I've always heard Linux was the easiest operating system to do things with less restrictions unlike window's. I wish I could return my external 4tb for a 2tb but that window has closed. I've just been holding onto it waiting for the day I can boot my rom collection off it instead of shuffling games back & forth from pc to mounted sd card due to filling the sd to the max.

If anyone has figured out how to successfully load retropie roms off a 4tb external I would love to share in your wisdom.

mitu

I'm noob to Linux based stuff but I've always heard Linux was the easiest operating system to do things with less restrictions unlike window's.

Yes, but you need to know Linux before things get 'easy'.

You forgot to mention what have you tried so far and what errors are you getting when using the drive. Please also add some more info about the setup.

Stealthbushido

@mitu said in Load retropie roms off external 4tb HDD?:

I'm noob to Linux based stuff but I've always heard Linux was the easiest operating system to do things with less restrictions unlike window's.

Yes, but you need to know Linux before things get 'easy'.

You forgot to mention what have you tried so far and what errors are you getting when using the drive. Please also add some more info about the setup.

Apologies. Thank you for the reply. I mostly blame myself for not investigating further before placing my order.

I ordered a Canakit Raspberry Pi 4 8gb Model B Complete Desktop Starter Kit with a Western Digital My Book "Powered" 4TB External HDD (Cause I heard the plug & play non power brick external HDD's are not as compatible with the pi do to having to draw power from the pi just to even work)

I used the bundled pre loaded 32GB micro sd card to setup my pi 4 for the desktop operating system and after updating it I swapped it out with spare 400GB Sandisk micro sd I had with pi image creator and retropie. After updating the 400GB card with all my emulators ect. I've been loading it up with my roms. It's full now so whenever I wanna swap out a few game's I gotta shuffle thing's around between my pi & pc.

I know I'm more fortunate then most having a 400GB card is definitely better then shuffling game's out over a much smaller card. I just prefer having room to add thing's without having to subtract thing's with all my digital media. As far as what I've tried before doing my research. I pretty much stopped after unsuccessfully formatting it through the pi itself. Error out when trying to pi image retropie onto the 4tb external hdd. Tried downloading different window's 10 compatible formating tool's on my windows 10 laptop. Eventually hitting thar roadblock that retropie wants fat32 but you can't format a drive to fat32 if it exceeds 2tb.

So yeah it was definitely my own fault. If I knew then I would have ordered a 2tb external instead. Last old forum post on this subject I saw with a post date of 2017 said he was gonna try to make 2 different partitions on his 4tb drive splitting it into two 2tb partitions in fat32 but he never posted his results. I've never split a drive in half like that so I wouldn't know where to begin or if it would even work.

Crush

@stealthbushido I'd look into formatting it into ext4 which is the current standard for Linux.
assuming you'll add roms trough the network share cause ext4 is not compatible with windows.

Stealthbushido

@crush I'll have to give that a try. I don't mind transferring my roms over the network as long as I can fit them all on there. Even though it won't load the external hdd on window's to edit can't I boot up my pi 4 os and edit it through the pi os though? For say watching movie's off it?

Crush

@stealthbushido said in Load retropie roms off external 4tb HDD?:

the

Yes it will work with any linux based operating system including pi os.

mitu

@stealthbushido said in Load retropie roms off external 4tb HDD?:

Tried downloading different window's 10 compatible formating tool's on my windows 10 laptop. Eventually hitting thar roadblock that retropie wants fat32 but you can't format a drive to fat32 if it exceeds 2tb.

That's a Fat32 limitation, you can use other filesystems with your drive - either a native Linux filesystem (ext4) or ntfs/exfat if Windows interoperability is needed.

RetroPie (RasPi OS) can read both ntfs and exfat, though note that they have their limitations - ntfs is (right now) slow to read and write and exfat has no journaling support, which means a filesystem check (in case of unclean shutdown) needs to scan the entire filesystem.

In addition to that, you'll need to format and partition the drive accordingly - as a GPT drive. On Linux ,fdisk is not enough, you need to use parted (or gparted for the graphical counterpart). On Windows, I don't know how the native formatting/partitioning tools work, but there should be a way to do it.

YFZdude

To format the drive in Windows 10 as a GPT disk:

Right click on "This PC" and select Manage
In the Computer Management window, select Disk Management toward the bottom of the left side
If a message appears asking if you want to initialize the disk, you can do so and select GPT and click OK
If the disk already has a format, you can right click under where is says Disk # and there should be an option to "Convert to GPT Disk"
NOTE: This will erase anything you have on the disk currently.
After the disk is set to GPT, you can right click the unallocated area (should be the whole disk) and choose "Create a New Simple Volume"
Set the file system type and label if desired, this will format the drive