Problem transferring roms to thumb drive

Drdave79

So I followed the instructions at https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/ to transfer my roms from my 512G Micro SD card to my 2TB flash drive. I created a folder on the empty flash drive called retropie-mount and made sure usbromservice in retroarch was on. It did create folders on the flash drive inside that folder, one called roms. Left the RP4 on all day. Came home and now the roms are gone from the sdcard, and the roms folder on the thumb drive is empty. All of the roms are gone.

What did I do wrong?

mitu

They're not really gone, looks like they didn't transfer correctly to the external drive but the drive was mounted anyway with empty folders, so the ROMs are not there.

Boot without the external disc attached and see if your ROMs are back. To see why the transfer didn't work, you can run

journalctl -xe -u usbmount

and see if any errors show up in the log.

Drdave79

@mitu Thanks Mitu. I found the problem. I thought exfat was ok, but apparently not. Once I formatted to fat32 (like the instructions said), it did in fact copy the roms over.

Drdave79

@mitu ok, so this process didn't work entirely as I had hoped. #1 it didn't copy over 5 of my emulators. #2 it didn't migrate all of my video snaps at all. This is very problematic for me because I've spent months on my video snaps.

Question: Can I just put the thumb drive in and add more roms to it instead of the micro sd card?

mitu

it didn't copy over 5 of my emulators.

It doesn't do that, emulators are installed in /opt/retropie, not in the roms folder.

2 it didn't migrate all of my video snaps at all.

Videos or other scraped data are by default not in the roms folder. Their location depends on your scraping options, see here for more details.

Question: Can I just put the thumb drive in and add more roms to it instead of the micro sd card?

Yes.

Drdave79

@mitu How can I add access to additional roms to the thumb drive and not transfer my existing roms?

mitu

@Drdave79 said in Problem transferring roms to thumb drive:

@mitu How can I add access to additional roms to the thumb drive and not transfer my existing roms?

Not sure what you mean. Do you want to keep your existing roms folder and the sdcard and use the drive just for certain systems ? Or you just want to copy ROMs from the sdcard to the drive ?

Drdave79

@mitu I'd like to use the flash drive as additional access for systems like PSX where I have over 1k games. So let's say I wanted to ONLY move PSX roms to the flash drive.

mitu

@Drdave79 You can do that, but this is not automatic. The steps are similar to the manual method from Running ROMs from a USB drive:

Disable the usbromservice from RetroPie-Setup
Connect the disk and configure it to be mounted at start-up (see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/#configure-fstab-to-automatically-mount-usb-drive) under a different folder (/home/pi/extra instead of /home/pi/Retropie how it's described on that page).
Create separate folders under /home/pi/extra for each system that you want to have on the external disc (i.e. /home/pi/extra/psx, /home/pi/extra/dreamcast, etc.), then transfer your existing games from the sdcard to those folders. You can use the File manager to transfer your files.
Add separate bind-mount commands for each folder you moved in the autostart.sh file:

mount -o bind /home/pi/extra/psx /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/psx
mount -o bind /home/pi/extra/dreamcast /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/dreamcast
# etc.

Test that everything is working fine with the external disk and then you can boot without it to clean up the folder you've transferred (erase the files from the sdcard).

Drdave79

@mitu Thanks so much for breaking that down! However, I've got lots of questions that don't jive with the instructions.

I don't have a /home/pi/extra folder. It's /home/pi/RetroPie-Extra. Is that one and the same?
Am I moving this folder to copying it? I'd thinking moving it would mess the existing structure up.
Where is the autostart.sh file?

Under the instructions page:

Under the "Configure fstab..." section. When I type that in, all I get is a long list of letters/numbers. It doesn't look like the example. Is that ok if all I'm taking down is the first 8 characters for the UUID?

mitu

I don't have a /home/pi/extra folder. It's /home/pi/RetroPie-Extra. Is that one and the same?

No, it should be a new folder, you can name it as you like.

Am I moving this folder to copying it? I'd thinking moving it would mess the existing structure up.

Not sure what you mean.

Where is the autostart.sh file?

It's in /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh. Add the mount lines before the command that starts emulationstation.

Under the instructions page:

Under the "Configure fstab..." section. When I type that in, all I get is a long list of letters/numbers. It doesn't look like the example. Is that ok if all I'm taking down is the first 8 characters for the UUID?

No, you'll need the entire UUID that's corresponding to your drive partition (most likely the partition will be named /dev/sda1).

Drdave79

@mitu When I type ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/ I get this:

Which looks different than this in the instructions:

pi@retropie:~ $ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Jun 19 21:59 7cc81461-50b9-45a8-a561-fd5c4aa71934 -> ../../mmcblk0p2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Jun 19 21:59 AE51-7D54 -> ../../mmcblk0p1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Jun 19 21:59 E44B-FC4E -> ../../sda1

mitu

@Drdave79 said in Problem transferring roms to thumb drive:

Which looks different than this in the instructions:

You're typing the command wrong - it's -l (lowecase L), not -1 (numeric 1).

Drdave79

@mitu

Drdave79

This post is deleted!

Drdave79

@mitu ok, this still isn't working. On restart, all games are missing. If I take the usb drive out, they come back. USBromservice is disabled.

I moved all of my PSX games (5 hours) to the usb drive in the /home/pi/extra/psx folder.

This is the autostart.sh file:

This is the fstab file:

@mitu any ideas?

mitu

@Drdave79 You're mounting the disc on /home/pi/RetroPie, instead of /home/pi/RetroPie/extra. This 'masks' the roms folder on the sdcard, that's why they appear missing.

Drdave79

@mitu So I need to change the fstab file or the autostart.sh file?

And the subfolder structure on the usb drive is /home/pi/extra. Do I need to change it to /home/pi/RetroPie/extra?

Drdave79

@mitu ok, so I changed the fstab to read UUID=1808-1615 /home/pi/extra... which matches the subfolder structure on the USB drive and it booted up with the rest of the roms ok. But PSX is missing. It's not seeing them on the USB drive.

Is the 3rd line of the autostart.sh file telling the system to replace the location of the PSX roms from the sd card to the usb drive? If so, it appears correct.

mitu

If you're starting the File Manager, do you see the psx folder in the /home/pi/extra folder ? What's the output of the mount command ?