Using External USB FAT32 Disk for Share Drive needs fixing!

retrorimmer

Not sure if this issue exists across all releases but I have installed batocera-5.19-x86-20181125.img.gz
onto an internal disk and set recalbox-boot.conf setting sharedevice=ANYEXTERNAL so I can use
a FAT32 USB disk as a shared drive for the roms, etc.

When booting the interface does not show and console tty3 shows errors trying to lock .Xauthority file.
This only happens on FAT32 formatteed drive. NTFS format works and EXT4 works. So I guess the
Xserver cannot start with the .Xauthority file stored on a FAT32 drive. The file is there, but it cannot be locked?
I deleted the .Xauthority from the console as root and the interface immediately appeared, so it does work to some point. However, the file has to be deleted on every reboot. Could be a permissions problem or an issue with Linux locks on FAT drives. I'm investigating further but so far only deleting .Xauthority file fixes the problem. I may add a bash script at boot up to touch/delete the file as a temp fix.

Dragu

@retrorimmer
Is it not more simple just to reformate the disk in ntfs ? Anyway ntfs should be faster as fat32.

retrorimmer

Dragu yes, ntfs works well but would save all the hassle of someone trying to use a fat32 disk and thinking it was something they did wrong when it fails to work.

Dragu

@retrorimmer
I try more and more to avoid internal harddisks 🙂
So, as example in my actual rebuild I just use an USB3 ssd even with 4 Sata III connectors on the motherboard. Because USB3 has the same speed as Sata, but you need no additional power cable and nobody want to have control over it. So, all Sata's stays idle, no driver and no hassle with the storage. USB3 sucks.

retrorimmer

Dragu yeah, that's ok if your system supports booting from USB and isn't crippled by that EFI crap. Most of the time the external drive is used for reading from so speed shouldn't be an issue even if USB2 is used.