Copying files to an external disk via network?

[ivwshane]

I'll post this question here because the wiki doesn't have any info on this yet, although I'm sure I'll find the answer in a minute.

I have a pi4 with an SD card and and external ssd drive. I'm using the nespi case which means that the ssd is connected via sata to USB.
The drive is brand new and has never been formatted. My pi is set to anyexternal.

Did I need to format the drive first before using it with recalbox?

Once its connected to the pi can I access it via a network connection through Windows?

I can already access the pi's ssd card via network share but the external drive does not show up.

What am I missing?

https://recalbox.gitbook.io/documentation/basic-manual/file-management/share-folder

[ivwshane]

@ivwshane

It looks like it wasn't working because I didn't format it. A quick format to ext in Windows allowed recalbox to do its thing.

However...

I can not get the gamelists to update correctly. The roms I installed via the network show up but the roms I loaded while the disc was connected to the computer do not. What's weird is that I can see the games via the recalbox share.

So the games are on the external disc but recalbox isn't seeing them. Using the update gamelists in UI doesn't appear to do anything.

[ivwshane]

Any help? Searching leads to wiki links that are outdated and I can’t find anything on github.

[Scavy]

@ivwshane hello
you have to format your SSD disk in exfat format. Plug it to your Pi, load Recalbox and choose your SSD drive (give it a name) in the menu.
RCB will reboot and create all required folders on your SSD.

[ivwshane]

@scavy said in Copying files to an external disk via network?:

@ivwshane hello
you have to format your SSD disk in exfat format. Plug it to your Pi, load Recalbox and choose your SSD drive (give it a name) in the menu.
RCB will reboot and create all required folders on your SSD.

So I did that and recalbox found it with no issues but the issue remained.

I decided to check the drive one more time and I discovered that the file system somehow duplicated itself.

This is what my drive had on it for example:

Share—>system name—>roms

But it also had a roms folder as well and that looked like this:

Share—>roms—>system name—>roms

My files were all in the first set except for one system. After I moved the files all to share—>roms—>system name, the game list was finally updated correctly.

I’m not sure what happened to cause the issue but it may have been caused by me originally formatting the drive without a drive letter and then after I had installed it I removed it and hooked it up back to my computer but this time I assigned a drive letter to it. I then reinstalled it in the pi and selected the newly named drive.

Easy enough fix thankfully.