First, erase your SD card using these instructions. Now, if something goes wrong with your card, you can restore it just as easily. After downloading and uncompressing the RetroPie image, you can write it to the SD card as you would any other operating system. When that’s finished, pop the card back into your Pi and continue as normal! That project is now backed up to your PC. While that downloads, you can get started with formatting a 4GB or larger microSD card (or full-size SD if using a classic Model A or B).
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As in, up to an hour or more depending on the size of your SD card. This reads the SD card’s data, turns it into an image, and saves that image at the specified location. When you’re done, click the “Read” button. If your Pi has multiple partitions, choose the first one-but don’t worry, this process will clone the entire card, not just the individual partition. Next, choose your Pi from the “Device” dropdown. I’ve given mine a name that lets me know which project and Pi in my house it’s for. In Win32 Disk Imager, click the blue folder button to select the location for the image you’re going to create. That’s okay, don’t format it! Just close the window and move on with the process. Note: If your Pi project is Linux-based (as many are), you may get a warning that the SD card is unreadable by Windows, and needs to be formatted. We recommend something like this Anker 8-in-1 reader ($10) because you can also use it for different SD formats. If you don’t have a reader built in to your PC, you’ll need to buy one.
How to install retropie on to sd card download#
Plug the SD card into your computer, download Win32 Disk Imager (if you haven’t already), and start it up. When your Pi is set up exactly as you want, shut it down and remove its SD card. For example, I use this technique for my two Raspberry Pis running Kodi-if either ever goes down, I can just re-clone my personal image, and the boxes are back up and running in no time, grabbing up-to-date library data from my home server and MySQL database as if nothing ever happened.Īnd as a bonus, you can more easily share your Raspberry Pi projects by just writing your cloned image out to a new SD card (or sharing the image itself).
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If you ever make changes to the Pi project, you’ll need to re-clone the image, but with a lot of projects, this is perfect. This works best with those Pi projects that require initial setup and then just run in the background, doing their thing. (If you don’t use Windows, you can do something similar on Linux with the dd command.) It’s so simple, every Raspberry Pi user should do it. When that happens, I can just re-clone that image to the SD card, overwriting the broken or corrupt version, and I’m be back up and running in no time. There I keep it, safely, until something goes wrong with my Pi.
How to install retropie on to sd card windows#
Once I set up my Pi project exactly how I want it, I just use Win32 Disk Imager on Windows to clone an image of its SD card onto my PC. I’ve had this happen all too often, and I eventually figured out a good solution.