Newbie question here about merging two Retropie SD cards

zulraptor

Hi there everybody, first of all thank you for letting me join the forums. I am in a situation where a friend that owns a retropie gave me a cloned copy of his retropie and we tested it on his raspberry pie which is the same version than mine (Raspberry Pi 3B+) and it worked perfectly fine. I had already installed the retropie image in my raspberry pi but my friend's retropie looked a lot cooler and better customized. When I plug the SD card he gave me in my raspberry pi all I see is some screen with a lot of color shades and that is all. I have a Linux Manjaro machine where I inspected both SD cards and they seem quite similar so I am not sure what the problem could be and that is why I am here. How could I copy all of the configuration, themes and games from the SD card that he gave me to my SD card that is currently working on my raspberry pi so that I can have all of the customization, themes, tweaks, games, etc etc that he has?

mitu

Why don't you install the image from his PI altogether ?
You'll need to be more specific about how his image is 'cooler' - it's it the theme shown when you browse the games, is it the game screen, etc. Maybe providing some screenshots would make things clearer.

zulraptor

It is everything he's got in his Retropie that looks better. Anyway, how would I go about installing the image from his Pi altogether like you mentioned. I already know how to make an image and everything, just don't know how to launch the installer within my raspberry pi.

mitu

@zulraptor https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/

zulraptor

Thank you so much! does this apply for a raspberry that has already had an image installed?

mitu

@zulraptor No, it's for imaging from zero, on a fresh Raspberry Pi.

zulraptor

@mitu what steps should I take to reset my current raspberry pie?

mitu

@zulraptor You said you have a cloned copy - what format is this copy ? If it's an image file (.img), the you follow the instructions I pointed at, using the image you have from your friend.

zulraptor

I found a video here that applies for my situation:

What my friend did was just give me that SD card that was already on his pie. So what I am doing right now is backing it up to an .img file and then I will restore it onto a new SD card.

I just didn't know I could do that until you mentioned it hehe. Thanks a lot mate!

EDIT: I will share a screenshot of how this retropie looks like when it is done so you can see why I like it a lot.