Automatic file expansion causes unbootable system

ymx

My weird first experience with batocera 5.27:
1) Burn.
2) The system boots fine. (This time)
3) The file system is automatically expanded.
4) Batocera launches.
5) Reboot.
6) Get stuck at BIOS screen where the system would normally list all of the connected drives. Disconnecting the usb drive allows the system to proceed. I attempted this with multiple USB media and had the same results.

It appears that this is related to the file expansion operation. This BIOS lockup behavior is reproducible with two entirely separate core 2 systems: A dual core E8500 (motherboard Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R) and a quad core Q6600 (motherboard Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L). A third i3 system boots just fine with the exact same expanded file system plugged in, so this appears to affect some systems and not others.

I have disabled auto-expansion in batocera-boot.conf prior to the first boot, and my system now survives reboots just fine. I think this workaround will work for me since I use network storage anyway. I wanted to put this here for any owners of similar systems that were as perplexed as I was, as well as bring it to the attention of the developers.

I’m very much looking forward to trying out 5.27. Thanks for everyone who has worked on this!

ymx

Ugh…not a great workaround afterall.. After doing some configuration work I’m getting “No space left on device” on /userdata, which is currently at 100% usage. I’d guess it is due to skipping the file expansion.

ymx

I couldn’t get any of my USB devices to be recognized by my motherboard after expanding the files system, even though it worked on the initial boot, This was true when I resized the partition myself using gParted instead of the built in script. According to gparted, all of the boot flags set on the drives were identical after expansion. The bios freeze happened when I only increased the /userdata partition by a small amount too, so it wasn’t like the drive became too large for detection.

The i3 computer always booted without problems, so it must be something weird with my old system. Anyway, I decided to give up and put the OS on a small hard drive and it booted right up.