How to change the default roms folder (to internal storage) if the TF2/EXT slot on RG280V is physically defective?

[aliquantulus]

What happened?

I received my first Anbernic device this week, but no matter what I do, the secondary TF2/EXT microSD slot on my RG280V seems to be defective. I have tried 3 different software packages to format the card to FAT32 with no label (guiformat.exe, Raspberry Pi Imager and GParted) and 4 different microSD cards (ranging from 16 GB to 128 GB), but no matter what I do, I can only see the mmcblk0 (nothing happens in dmesg (via USB 10.1.1.2.) and lsblk only shows mmcblk0 and it's two partitions (when using Adam image 2.1 and 1.6). I get the exact same results from the slot when I boot the original Anbernic Kioxia SD-card. I have reached out to Anbernic, but if I could get games to be scanned from slot1 I would consider keeping this defective device (at the moment I can manually search for roms via retroarch which is the only "game" found, but that's a lot more steps to start gaming each time than just having the device scan the correct folder and finding the games that way).

Device

RG280V

Version

v2.1

[eduardofilo]

There are many adjustments made in Adam to make things work towards the external card. I'll tell you the main ones if you want to give it a try, but there will probably be things I've left out that you'll have to figure out.

• For SimpleMenu, edit the .ini files in ~/.simplemenu/section_groups
• For RetroArch, edit the .retroarch/retroarch.cfg

Another thing you could try is to create a new partition on the internal card and then mount it manually on /media/sdcard with some script during boot.

In the past I remember one person also had problems with the EXT slot and was able to fix it by reflowing the solder joints in the slot.

[aliquantulus]

I actually tried creating the /media/sdcard folder (with the intent of putting the roms there), but even with sudo I got read only file system error when I tried sudo mkdir /media/sdcard/. If you have a way around that error then that will probably be the easiest fix for my RG280V and I would be eternally grateful (I'll even donate to get a fix where I can use a 128 GB microSD with roms in slot #1.

[Sakitoshi]

i have mine working with only a single sd card.
i created a script to mount mmcblk0p3 (AKA a third partition, fat32 in this case) on /media/data/local/etc/init.d/ via terminal (root permission required, couldn't do it via ftp) and named it S06_loadroms.sh, name doesn't really matter, but needs to start with S06 to load it after S05_loadexfat.sh. the content is:

#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
    start)
        printf "Loading roms partition"
        if [ ! -d /media/sdcard ] && mount|grep -q /dev/mmcblk0p3
        then
        mount -o remount,rw /media
        umount /media/mmcblk0p3
        rmdir /media/mmcblk0p3
        mkdir -p /media/sdcard
        mount /dev/mmcblk0p3 -o rw,uid=1000,gid=100 /media/sdcard
        mount -o remount,ro /media
        echo "done"
        fi
        ;;
    stop)
        # Nothing to do
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop}"
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

the script first checks if a mount point named sdcard already exists (if it does it means a second sdcard is inserted and does nothing) and if it doesn't it remounts the third partition of the first as sdcard and sets the proper permissions.
you can also just create an exfat partition and label it sdcard (all lowercase), the mount point of a labeled partition is named after the label instead of generic names and as the system just looks for a mount point named sdcard, the system is happy to use it without complains as long as it's lowercase. exfat supports lowercase labels while fat32 labels are always uppercase.

i find kinda dumb that you are forced to use a second sdcard when a single sdcard can be used for the system and roms without issues.

[aliquantulus]

After trying a lot of different folders (and partitioning a separate partition that auto mounted to /media/mmcblk0p3 etc) I finally gave up and opened it up. The pads and solder joints were perfect, but that little thing on the side of TF-slot2 that registers if a card is inserted or not was bent towards slot#1 (while the metal thing on slot#1 was flush with the rest of the card-slot), so I simply bent that parallell and now it has created all the folders on the secondary SD-card as expected, and when I put roms on that card everything works like it should. That said, I really wish it would be easier (or at least not seemingly impossible) to also put roms on the internal card. It could be a fallback when a card slot fails (and right to repair mentaly would suggest that a secondary card slot being faulty should not make the entire device useless).