[roverius]

@xflesk

Try to use AOMEI Partition tools to format the disk before use in the PI
http://www.disk-partition.com/free-partition-manager.html

Its a free tool and you can format the USB drive into Ext3.

[roverius]

Update:

1: I have made my USB Harddisk into ext4 filesystem.
2: i checked whit: sudo fdisk -l what drive i had (i this case it was sda5)
3: i did a mount sudo mount /dec/sda5 /mnt/sda
4: I created a folder “retropie” inside the /mnt/sda
midnight commander is a good tool to browse and/or edit files (sudo mc)
5: i reboot the pie and let the drive populate the rom foldes
6: in fstab i made a line to mount the drive
7: changed the permissions on the retropie folder (sudo chmod -R 777 retropie)
8: opened Filezilla and copied some roms to the drive (example: to /mnt/sda/retropie/roms/atari2600)
9: changed the path inside etc/es_systems.cfg into:
<path>/mnt/sda/retropie/atari2600</path>

all seems to be working fine now and nothing copies to the SDCard.

game started good and i was able to play
Still need some control configuring to exit the game back into menu.

Thanks for some helpfull advice and i hope some others can use this information also to play roms from a USB harddrive.

[roverius]

mine is set to fat32, but i will change to ext4 (or ext3) and see what hapens.

I keep you informed of the progress.

Thanks for the helpfull information so far.

[roverius]

OK,

now i am getting somewhere:

I added a line in fstab to mount my drive like
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda

i see the roms now and they do not copy anymore to my SD card.
BUT: they don’t start up, probably due to permissions on that mount point.
so, i have changed the permissions (chmod – R 777 on the romsfolder)
trying to transfer files over FTP does not work (it does copy to the SD card folder)

[roverius]

my files are located for example atari2600 in:
R:\retropie\roms\atari2600\ (windows point of view)

the path location is set to:
<path>/dev/sda/retropie/roms/atari2600</path>

still the files are copied.

folder names do not have capital letters.

[roverius]

Ok,

I checked the drive list and i assume the HD is on sda1

Weird thing is, if i point to a wrong path, why does it still copy the files to SD?
Shouldn’t there be some error because of the path not correct in the es_config file?

[roverius]

i see youre foldername says “Retropen”, so i guess u use a USB Thumbdrive

I use a USB HARDDRIVE (500G disk).
Could it be possible that the path to the disk is not /media/usb, but somthing like /dev/hda or sda or anything like this.

The USB harddrive did populate the romsfolders, but when i enter ls -l /media/usb* i dont see any folders (* = usb0 to usb7)

the harddrive is recognized by the system, but i cant find where it is mounted.

[roverius]

Thanks for reply,

Did not work, files are still copied to internal SD drive

see attachment file for settings.

[roverius]

Hi,

i have edited the es_systems.cfg file and changed the path line to point to the USB drive.

I copied some files to the roms folder, but somehow, the roms are still copied to the SD drive.

example:
<path>/media/usb0/retropie/emulatorname</path>

How can i prevent the copying to the SD drive

Regards,
Roverius

[Author]

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