MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi.

I've been using the Mister for almost a year now and it's been fantastic. The other day, I got an 8TB Seagate external USB drive to store my collection. By all accounts I should have just needed a "games" directory on an NTFS file system and should have been good to go. I'm using the "default" usb hub that you can usually buy with the rest of the Mister parts.

My first try hooking it up - it WOULD allow me to switch from the SD Card to the USB drive, but wouldn't see any files or directories. Then I updated and rebooted with the USB drive hooked up - and then I couldn't switch to it at all. I even tried using the USB 3 port on the Mister board itself.

At this point, I did a little digging and I'm getting the "the driver for the usb controller dwc2_hsotg does not support scatter-gather" error for this usb device.

Based on what I've been reading about this issue, using a different usb hub should work?

I'd like a little confirmation on the issue before I go spending more money. Does anybody know if there is a definitely workaround for this? Also, once I do get it running, is there a way to boot from the USB drive and/or change the directory that the MAME sets are downloaded?

TIA.

If by "default" usb hub you mean the small unpowered OTG hub from Amazon then it is almost certain it is the source of the problem: you need a powered hub. Here I use a generic powered USB hub I had lying around, I just had to connect it using an OTG cable as the hub was just a regular hub.
Forget about NTFS, you will run into problems, use exFAT.
Booting from USB is not supported at this time and I don't even know if it will be possible. Even if it is possible don't count on it being implemented any time soon.
It is possible to change the location of these files using the update script with the proper update.ini file and the update_all script (the version for usb) with the proper update_all.ini file.
I went a step further by using the "Switch to USB" function from the menu see:
viewtopic.php?p=21885#p21885
Even if you don't use "Switch to USB" you will find the ini files there.
If your drive is a real HDD (not a SSD) it will likely spin down which stresses the HDD and is also a pain (HDD take a long time to spin up).
You can make it spin forever:
viewtopic.php?p=14964#p14964

Regarding the hub wait until someone else pitches in as you get this driver error.

Galaxy_Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Mar 28, 2021 5:38 am I even tried using the USB 3 port on the Mister board itself.

FYI - that's the "USER" port, not a USB 3 port. It uses the blue colored USB interface, but it is actually a direct interface to the core. The BlisSTer board, mt32-pi, and SNAC accessories all use it. But it is NOT USB!

Thanks for the responses guys. It took me a while to get back because I had to wait for some adapters from Amazon, etc.

I removed the old powered USB hub that came with my MiSTer. I then replaced it with a powered usb hub strip. To that I connected my 8TB powered USB Hard Drive formatted to exFAT, and my wireless keyboard.

I turned it on, ran Update All and then switched to USB storage - No Files!

I then connected to the MiSTer via FTP - and was able to browse to the files on the 8TB drive via /usb0.

SO, that tells me the MiSTer can actually see the files. But why won't they show up?

You're not supposed to switch to usb. The MiSTer will look for and find games on your hdd automatically assuming the folder structure on your hdd is correct. So it still needs to be in "sd card mode".

Just out of curiosity. Did you get it working?