Help when booting up retropie

wheats8

Hi,

I decided to add a couple of emulators to retropie and after rebooting it now won't boot up correctly. Normally when it boots up it flashes the Retropie image on boot up, that doesn't happen anymore and it won't boot to emulation station.
It comes up with /use/bin/emulationstation: cannot execute binary file: exec format error.

Is this something that can be fixed? I don't understand why it's done this because it was working fine before adding the emulators.

Thanks

sleve_mcdichael

Please add some more information about your system as requested in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

How did you install RetroPie? What emulators did you add & how did you add them? Have you done anything else lately?

wheats8

@sleve_mcdichael hi, yes sorry it's a raspberry pi 4 and I downloaded raspbian buster from the website and flashed it to my SD card. All that set up fine and was working correctly and booting to emulation station, I had ROMs added which were working fine. I had a couple of MAME & SNES ROMs which were not loading up so looked to add a couple of new emulators. I added advanced MAME emulator and also added one for SNES (can't remember the name) think it was something like SNES x9? I added these through the packages on the Retropie through the configs setting. It showed that those emulators had been installed so I did a reboot to ensure everything was updated and working correctly and when booting up it finishes with this issue. It allows me to type commands in, like it would if you opened a window in the desktop so I got it to load the desktop up to see if I could change anything from there. I've tried just putting in emulation station but it just shows that same issue. It's like it can't find it, also to add I added the emulators from source when installing.

mitu

@wheats8 said in Help when booting up retropie:

It comes up with /use/bin/emulationstation: cannot execute binary file: exec format error.

Are you using the normal (32bit) Raspberry Pi OS image or the 64 bit version ? How large is your sdcard ? Can you check if you've run out of space ?

Try re-installing the EmulationStation package. From the command prompt, run

cd $HOME/RetroPie-Setup
sudo ./retropie_setup.sh

then choose Manage Packages > Manage core packages > EmulationStation the reinstall the package. Reboot and see if EmulationStation starts.

wheats8

@mitu yes I believe it was the 32 bit version I downloaded and set up. The SD card is 250gb card so there should be plenty of space on it. I have quite a few ROMs on it but mostly SNES and megadrive so they shouldn't take up much space. I will give that a try and see if it fixes the issue and report back. Thanks

BuZz

@wheats8 it's worth verifying your card is not counterfeit. A counterfeit card will cause filesystem corruption which could cause issues like this

https://photographylife.com/fake-memory-cards

wheats8

@mitu I tried to reinstall emulationstation and it didn't make any difference, I then did a basic install and when rebooting the Retropie screen came up but then it paused again like before but comes up with.
/Usr/bin/emulationstation: line21: /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation.sh: permission denied.

I've also noticed it says a number (changes per line) then EXT4-fs error and there's about 21 lines. Would be easier if I could attach images but says the image is too big.

mitu

Check whether your sdcard is fake, as @BuZz suggested, I think that's most likely the issue here.

wheats8

@mitu I actually looked online after my last post and someone has had the same issue and apparently it's a power issue. I've not had chance to take it apart and test the power supply as of yet had too much on. That's going to be the next thing I check and go from there. I'll report back whether that resolves it or not. I'm pretty certain the card is legit, I don't know any other way of testing it other than checking the memory which I did first day I got it.

Clyde

How exactly did you check the memory? Fake cards report a bigger size than they actually are. You'll only notice it after you write more than their actual size to them, as the exceeding data will be lost, often without any error messages if the fake card was done well.

If you can boot to RetroPie's command line, you can try to install the tool f3 and test the card with that:

sudo apt install f3  # install the tool
cd                   # change to home directory
makedir test         # create a test directory
f3write test         # write 1 GB sized test files until the card is full
f3read test          # read the files' test patterns
rm -r test           # remove the test directory

It will test the actual amount of data that can successfully be written to the card and read again.