Batocera Doesn't See External Drive Anymore?

omn1slash

Weird issue I encountered yesterday... I was playing a Wii game I had for testing, and I did a "exit to Wii menu" by accident instead of closing out with the hot key (force of habit from owning a Wii) and the game crashed.
When I reboot Batocera, all of my games were missing. When I hit F1 to view the drive, the drive was now missing.
I tried setting the external drive again in the settings, but anything I changed was not saved when I rebooted.
I ended up having to reformat the entire image and then it picked up the drive briefly, until I mounted it in Windows using an EXT application to transfer roms back and forth quicker and the same thing happened after I booted the drive back into Batocera! Re-imaged again and the drive is fine, but I'm worried if any glitches happen that its going to do the same thing after I take time transferring all these games.
Any idea what to do when this happens or why Batocera stops seeing the drive? It's like it was only reading what is in the CPU RAM and not the drive itself despite booting it.
I'm running the 5.21 PC x64 build.

retrorimmer

I've had similar issue with that build, I think it's something to do with the partition that is created to save the settings and store your ROMS. If you plug it into a Windows box then it may get corrupted by Windows or the EXT application you are using is corrupting something on the drive. I have random boot issues with that build, usually after changing preferences in the menu. Sometimes resets to default and loses all settings.

The boot drive is a squashed file system and so does not store any settings so will not have any issues booting after a crash from corrupt or locked files (apart from the recalbox-boot.conf file in the root which can cause a boot failure if not set correctly). The system will boot to default if the shared settings drive or partition is not found or corrupted.

From my experience, you will run into problems if you decide to try copy files over manually from a Windows box, the system is tightly configured to use Samba and network shares for ROM transfers. Using 3rd party apps and mounting drives in Windows will usually leave you with a corrupted or problematic disk.

Although the idea of using a USB stick to store files is much more preferred as it makes backups easy and can also use the stick in other machines. But as you have found you will run into problems at some point which I think is caused by file locking and locked files left on the drive after a crash, which can prevent Batocera fromm booting or reading/writing the files on the drive.

What utility did you use to burn the Batocera image ?

omn1slash

retrorimmer You are likely on to something there, and I'll just stick to network transfers from now on, but it certainly doesn't answer what happend when I had that hard crash when existing the Wii game via the menu.

I'll refrain from plugging this drive into Windows, but my fear is I get all these roms transferred (I have 2 Terrabyte) and then have it do this and no way to fix it.

retrorimmer

omn1slash I think your best bet is to have Batocera setup to use another USB stick formatted as NTFS to store all your ROMs for the shared drive and just use a smaller usb stick for the boot image. That way you can easily update the Batocera boot image and keep all your ROMs, settings etc.. on the other USB stick which can also be used in a Windows box without mounting or using EXT app readers. After booting Batocera with boot USB disk, just insert the NTFS formatted USB disk and go to the settings to change the shared drive to the NTFS USB drive.
It sounds complicated but this is what I found works if you are wanting to transfer files from a Windows box without networking or smaba shares.

Kossay

hi!,good mornig! i got batocera 5.21 all working fine on a ssd, but im running out of space and i got still a lot of games to add, is there a 2 disk hardrive support?, like on windows, we add a 2nd disk name it for ex: "games" setup the access route and thats all.
Or we have to use only 1(physical) drive?

Hola buenas, quisiera saber si es posible tener un 2do disco en batocera 5.21 fisicamente, por ejemplo tener el sistema en el ssd + algunos juegos, y luego agregar un disco secundario y seguir cargando juegos alli. Los reconoce?se puede?(como se haria en windows cuando seteamos una ruta de acceso para un 2do disco fisico de juegos).-

Cheers/Saludos>!

bello

Can everybody tell me why batocera only see an ext4 partition on the same stick but on other stick it can use NTFS?
WHy is it not possible to use NTFS on the same stick instead of ext4?
What is the reason for that?

retrorimmer

bello
In simple terms, because it is a Linux OS and NTFS is a Windows optimized file system.

The boot image automatically creates an Ext4 partition and can only be used for ROM transfers to that partition from a network share or through the Batocera file manager. You can use another USB stick to transfer roms over to that partition or set it up as a shared drive for Batocera. The USB boot image will not detect another partition on the same USB stick it is booted from other than the one that is initially created. Save yourself alot of hassle and just use another USB stick or internal hdd for ROMS. USB sticks are only detected when plugged in and I don't think Batocera will like being unplugged and plugged in order to detect itself as another drive. If you like getting your hands dirty, then you could get around this by some console commands and a little script editing of the file system table.

AFAIK USB sticks (not drives) can only have one partition, they do not officially support mutliple partitions unless you use a 3rd party utility or linux partition manager. Windows defo doesn't like multiple partitions on the same USB stick (especially if one has a linux partition), as they are not really drives just flash memory configured with a file system partition but without the dedicated disk controller.