LibreELEC / RetroPie External Drives

  • Hello, I'm having some difficulty in connecting a four-drive HDD dock to my Raspberry Pi 4 running Kodi through RetroPie. The workaround has been to install LibreELEC on a second card which works very well, and is able to recognise the dock and read/write just fine. If possible, given how markedly Kodi behaves in each instance, I'd like to try and figure out why the two setups react to the dock so differently (both using most up-to-date software).

    All three drives are in good working order, and are recognised by LibreELEC and Windows 10 machines. Yet, when running Kodi through RetroPie, not all of the drives are even recognised when connected. Usually, two out of three of the drives appear in File Manager. Only once, were all three recognised, and media was scraped as usual. When the Pi was rebooted, one of the drives disappeared again, and frustratingly, all of the media paths became 'scrambled' requiring an incomplete rescrape...

    This seems to be down to how Kodi through RetroPie, and Kodi through LibreELEC deal with external USB connections. One example, is when adding a media source through LibreELEC, Root Filesystem will conveniently list all attached drives by their label. Kodi through RetroPie, on the other hand, provides a long list of usb, usb0, usb1, usb2, etc, and appears to assign a stricter drive path that, if for any reason becomes interrupted or amended, seems to shift all other recognised drives to the next available path, most often requiring a complete rescrape.

    I'd be very grateful to learn more on how LibreELEC recognises external drives, and if this functionality could somehow be implemented into RetroPie. Cheers!