trimmtrabb
Participant
Post count: 480

[quote=2583]For anyone else trying to install RetroPie to a USB stick, it’s not difficult at all. If you are using win32diskimager in Windows, you can just insert the desired USB stick and tell the RetroPie image to copy there.

Then, all’s you have to do is have an SD card installed with Raspbian or RetroPie and go to the FAT32 partition named “boot” on it. There will be a file called cmdline.txt. Find root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 and change it to root=/dev/sda2. Make sure that both SD and USB are in the RPi next time you boot. You will notice that the green activity light does not flash hardly as much since the SD card is not being used after boot.

I did this last night, and I expected a huge decrease in boot time like others have mentioned. No luck. It seemed about the same or a little slower than booting from a Class 4 SD card. I’m not sure why. The USB I was using probably isn’t the fasted out there. I think it is a Kingston Data Traveler 8GB.

My impetus for changing to a USB drive for the RetroPie was speed and access to the ROMs folder. Then I remembered that the ROMs folder is still in the ext4 partition that Windows cannot get to. Oh well. I can boot into Ubuntu on my computer, but I don’t want to do that every time I want to change ROMs. RetroPie is so close to making these a standalone unit. The only thing lacking is a ROM manager. Right now, it’s not possible to delete ROMs from inside Emulation Station. Almost everything else you could want to do is possible.

If a ROM manager and scraper were added to ES, it would be incredible. However, I am really impressed with all the work that has already been put in. Thanks, guys!
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i am running off usb too, my sd card was corrupting even when I shut down properly. Do you know how to expand the file system to use all of the available space on the usb drive, using the 4gb image on a 16gb drive?