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To try to make this part as short as possible, last month I put together a raspberry Pi 3 B+ system for playing retro games and while the 64GB USB flash drive was thought to be enough I soon found out that wasn't the case even with attempts to compress disc images to save space so I decided to get a 500GB maxtor M3 portable hard drive (along with a wireless keyboard and an XboxOne wireless controller to cut down the number of wires) to have more then enough space.
I got everything set up with the required directory and make sure I copied the remaining structure to the hard drive to make sure I had the retropie settings accessible when I had the drive connected and while everything worked on the first boot when I shut it down and restarted it (I have it in a retroflag superpi case using the safe shutdown script and I can't access either the board or the switch for the safe shutdown since the screws were complete garbage and I stripped the head of at least one of the screws) neither the hard drive nor the wireless keyboard worked.
I checked both afterwards and they worked and booting the Pi again with both the keyboard and the hard drive connected resulted in the same problem after a shutdown and restart, so I decided to disconnect them and plugged them into the USB ports on the front of the case and while both worked again I received an under voltage warning (I was in the retropie terminal after reconnecting the dongle for the wireless keyboard) when I plugged the hard drive in.
I've already come to the conclusion that the power draw for the USB hard drive is too much for the Pi to fully handle (unless it shouldn't and something is wrong with the Pi itself) and that to solve it I'm going to either run the drive on the network (which has turned out to be a pain as well since the router I've just got only supports SMB1 and all of my computers are windows 10 which would require hooking up the drive directly to add anything to it or use a computer with an OS that still has SMB1 support), use a powered USB hub to avoid having to draw power from the Pi itself or get a 5v 3a power supply (I'm using an official 5v 2.5a power supply) to see if the slight amp increase would be enough.
Edit: I've given up on trying to get it set up over the network since I've tried to mount the drive using the documents on the retropie site but nothing has worked since I don't even know how the drive is set up on the plusnet hub one plus I had the same issue with the keyboard failing to work so I've probably buggered this Pi up and I'll have to start from scratch.
Edit2: I decided to give mounting a network drive a second go and somehow managed to get it to mount (probably because I got the proper location for the drive punched in correctly this time) so that is at least solved although the remaining issues I'm having I'm just putting down to slight glitches.
I got everything set up with the required directory and make sure I copied the remaining structure to the hard drive to make sure I had the retropie settings accessible when I had the drive connected and while everything worked on the first boot when I shut it down and restarted it (I have it in a retroflag superpi case using the safe shutdown script and I can't access either the board or the switch for the safe shutdown since the screws were complete garbage and I stripped the head of at least one of the screws) neither the hard drive nor the wireless keyboard worked.
I checked both afterwards and they worked and booting the Pi again with both the keyboard and the hard drive connected resulted in the same problem after a shutdown and restart, so I decided to disconnect them and plugged them into the USB ports on the front of the case and while both worked again I received an under voltage warning (I was in the retropie terminal after reconnecting the dongle for the wireless keyboard) when I plugged the hard drive in.
I've already come to the conclusion that the power draw for the USB hard drive is too much for the Pi to fully handle (unless it shouldn't and something is wrong with the Pi itself) and that to solve it I'm going to either run the drive on the network (which has turned out to be a pain as well since the router I've just got only supports SMB1 and all of my computers are windows 10 which would require hooking up the drive directly to add anything to it or use a computer with an OS that still has SMB1 support), use a powered USB hub to avoid having to draw power from the Pi itself or get a 5v 3a power supply (I'm using an official 5v 2.5a power supply) to see if the slight amp increase would be enough.
Edit: I've given up on trying to get it set up over the network since I've tried to mount the drive using the documents on the retropie site but nothing has worked since I don't even know how the drive is set up on the plusnet hub one plus I had the same issue with the keyboard failing to work so I've probably buggered this Pi up and I'll have to start from scratch.
Edit2: I decided to give mounting a network drive a second go and somehow managed to get it to mount (probably because I got the proper location for the drive punched in correctly this time) so that is at least solved although the remaining issues I'm having I'm just putting down to slight glitches.
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