Rom folder in External Hard drive?

prededor5

i was thinking could i use an external harddrive hooked up to my Raspberry pi and have Pimame/ mame4all look for roms in that Harddrive? because i downloaded a 42gb MAME rom set and i really want to have all the games available

mholgatem

yes, you can. That's what I do. The easiest way is to create a directory and then use fstab to auto mount your drive to that folder, then replace each of the folders in /home/pi/pimame/roms with symbolic links that point to the correct folders on your drive.

mount your drive:

 http://www.techjawab.com/2013/06/how-to-setup-mount-auto-mount-usb-hard.html

first remove folder, then create symbolic link:

rm /home/pi/pimame/roms/nes
ln -s /path/to/your/hard/drive/roms/nes/ /home/pi/pimame/roms/nes

mattju

Im trying to do the same but when I type

rm /home/pi/pimame/roms/nes

I get the message cannot remove as it is a directory? any ideas, thanks

mholgatem

type

sudo rm /home/pi/pimame/roms/nes

if there are files in there, you have to add a recursive function to delete everything, so you would then type

sudo rm -r /home/pi/pimame/roms/nes

seagull

Can it run rom.s from a memory stick

Conno123009

When I mount my USB, I just added

mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb

to .profile

Is it different for NTFS, etc?

mholgatem

@seagull - yes, you can run roms from a memory stick.

@Conno123009 - it's mostly the same, but with formats like ntfs you have to install drivers. I kept my thumbdrive formatted as ntfs so that I can still plug it into my windows machine to transfer bulk files faster than ftp. I had to use the fstab method because I was getting chown errors and the only tutorials I could find said to use fstab :) . Also, I like to use the UUID since I am constantly changing what is plugged into my usb, some things load sooner than others and may take that sda1 slot. Once I settle on a final setup for my arcade, I'll probably re-format to a unix based format though, I hear it gives you much better read/write speeds.

LeeColon

http://www.bestsellingreviews.com/Computer/External-Hard-Drive/
Here is my situation, I am new to forum and Linux side of things , so I have to know how to setup an external hard drive and make it so the pictures will go to the external hard drive rather than the original area? So what do I have to do?

mholgatem

First you need to mount your hard drive (just google it, there are tons of tutorials).
Next you need to move the roms folder to your hard drive
mv ~/pimame/roms /path/to/external/hard/drive
now you need to create a symbolic link where the roms folder used to be, and point it to where it is now:
ln -s ~/path/to/external/hard/drive/roms ~/pimame/roms

and that should do it

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