[SOLVED] HELP! Error: start4.elf is not compatible - This board requires newer software. WHAT???

TPR

I have four Pi 4 boards - 2gb. Three of them work just fine. No issues. The fourth one... I put in the SD card... the same SD card with my RetroPie build that I've been working on for months that also works perfectly fine on the other three boards, and I'm getting the following error:

start4.elf: is not compatible
This board requires newer software
Get the latest software from ...

I've never seen this before. Do I have a defective board? Or is there really some sort of firmware upgrade I need to install that I've never had needed to install before in the countless RetroPie's I've put together???

Please help! Thank you!

EDIT: I'm reading in another thread that there is an OS update? I don't understand why my build works in three Pi 4 boards, but not the fourth one. How can I get my current Pi 4 RetroPie build to work on this newer board? I don't want to have to go through and re-do my RetroPie build all over again as it has been months worth of work and it wouldn't be a simply copy/paste.

Is there a way to roll back the firmware on this newer Pi 4 board to the same one as the older board?

Please help! Thank you!

windg

I think a new revision of Raspberry Pi4 is out that needs a newer version of Pi OS. Put the SD Card to one of the working Pi4 and update the system, especially the underlying packages.

TPR

@windg So at first glance, it would seem that doing a "sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade" on the old build I had, and then putting that updated SD card in the new Pi is actually working! Thanks for that suggestion!

TPR

So I'm going to mark this one as [SOLVED] as what I posted above did seem to fix it. I'm still looking into my build more now to see if anything else might have been broken along the way, but for now, so far so good! Here's what I did.

I put my current SD card with the older OS into an older Pi 4.
From Emulation Station I pressed F4 to get into the terminal and typed:

sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

The update took about 40 minutes to complete.
Once I did that, I typed "emulationstation" into the terminal, and did a system shutdown from ES.
I then re-booted the now updated SD card to make sure it worked in the old Pi, and once it loaded up, I shut down from ES once again.
Took that updated SD card and put it into the new Pi 4 and it seemed to work just fine.
Immediately made a backup of that now working SD card! <-- VERY IMPORTANT!!!

The SD card now seems to work just fine in both the old Pi 4 and the new Pi 4.

I still don't quite understand why the old SD card won't work in the newer Pi 4's as I'm still using Debian Buster on both versions of the SD card. I also had no idea that there was any OS on the actual Pi board itself as I thought it was all contained within the SD card. I'm not exactly sure why my build wasn't working on the newer boards, but I'm at least happy I've found this work around.

djavs

@TPR any chance of a video as someone like me learns by watching videos an step

g4h

@TPR What is the version of old Pi 4 ?thank you!

windg

@g4h The latest version of RetroPie 4.8, is working with all revisions of RPi4.