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To enable external storage, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Main Menu with [START] and navigate to System Settings > Storage Device. install2.jpg external-storage1.jpg
  2. Select your storage device. Selecting “AnyExternal” will use the first external storage device that connects. How does your system decide what the first external storage device is when there is more than one connected? I'd like to know too. external-storage2.jpg

In most cases, using a second USB hard drive to host your ROMs separately from the Batocera system should be totally transparent when you use the dedicated menu item to enable it. According to Batocera, it will just appear as if though the roms/ folder is on your userdata/ partition.

Batocera has a built-in tools to format drives. BE ULTRA CAREFUL WHEN USING THIS, AS YOU CAN DESTROY ALL DATA WITH IT! You can prepare the drive in the right format by using Main Menu > System Settings > Developer > Format a Disk.

However, when tinkering with the systems, things can go wrong. The following is here to help you troubleshoot and fix those cases.

Say you are running Batocera off a USB pendrive (or SD card) but want to host your ROM files on a different hard drive. In that case, you need to edit /boot/batocera-boot.conf and provide the information of the hard drive that hosts your ROMs. In order to do that, you can list the UUID of the drive that hosts the ROMs by typing the blkid command:

  /dev/sdb2: LABEL="SHARE" UUID="12e46ca9-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxx" TYPE="ext4"
  /dev/sdb1: LABEL="BATOCERA" UUID="zzzz-zzzz" TYPE="vfat"
  /dev/sda1: LABEL="SHARE" UUID="2efa1068-yyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyyyyyyyy" TYPE="ext4"

In that example, /dev/sdb1 is my Batocera boot partition, /dev/sdb2 is the rest of my Batocera USB pendrive (that I don't want to use) and /dev/sda1 is the partition hosting my ROM files. In order to use that partition, I need to edit /boot/batocera-boot.conf and replace:

sharedevice=INTERNAL

with

sharedevice=DEV 2efa1068-yyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyyyyyyyy

If the drive is empty, the file structure for the ROM files will be created on next reboot.

If you are using an external hard drive and it is not recognized correctly after doing this, then it might be that your external hard drive needs more time to spin up while Batocera boots. In those cases you have to edit the /boot/batocera-boot.conf file and add the line: sharewait=15 underneath the aforementioned line (if it still does not work, try with a higher number like sharewait=20 for example).

  • store_games_on_a_second_usb_sata_drive.1630043819.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 3 years ago
  • by atari