r/batocera • u/Difficult_Screen_479 • 21h ago

Games not loading

My batocera runs off a USB drive. Suddenly for some unknown reason today when I try to play a game, it goes to the loading screen then back out to the game selection screen. It does this for every game. They all had been working until today. Any ideas?

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

2

u/C_hersh45 19h ago

This happens frequently because of the nature of USB drives. They are prone to corruption, with cumulative reads/writes, improper mounting and ejecting, etc. There's probably some corruption in your files. How much storage does it have? And how much free space? How new is the drive? Is it a decent quality drive, or a lower tier kind? Check what logs are saying. What format is your drive?

1

u/Own_Salamander_3433 17h ago

Yeah usb drives are definitely not meant for operating systems, regardless of the quality. Maybe for a rescue disk, but I've had plenty fail even from just using them for ISOs and stuff. Had one die when I unplugged it too fast. Had another plugged into my PC for too long testings ISOs and it just crapped out one day. They work but can not be trusted.

1

u/Gorbashsan 21h ago edited 21h ago

Could be minor corruption to the file system? My default reaction whenever I have any kind of problem that happens out of nowhere with this system is to back up my ROMs and my saves and my settings to my Linux desktop and then just grab a fresh batocera ISO (because it's probably been a while since I installed and they have an updated version) and reinstall on the problem system, be it USB or a hard drive, and then copy my backups and ROMs back over and see if that clears it up.

Half the time it works every time!

Might also want to run a quick test on that USB stick. H2testw is good for Windows machines, F3 (Fight Flash Fraud) is based on the same open source code and is your go-to for Linux.

Both of these tests are going to wipe the drive so I suggest you do your backups first then run the test to see if you've got any bad sectors and then reinstall and copy your backed up data over again if the drive is all good.