Pi 4 will not boot 1024Gb with retropi img

HavronL

I have a raspberry pi 4 with 4gb I imaged with retropie-buster-4.8-rpi4_400.img -- card boots real fast and I see linux then when it restarts then nothing -- I tried 2 diff card Alisinsen cards... I checked and the Pi supports 1024GB -- do I need another image of retropie or should I build stand alone and then install retropie? The same pi boots fine with 64GB using the same image.
Update: I was able to build 1024GB with Pi imager tool but not with retropie image as listed above

mitu

The RetroPie image is based on the Raspberry Pi OS image (Lite), albeit on the previous version, so the boot process should be identical.
1st boot will always do an 'expand filesystem' operation which might take some time, then it will automatically reboot. If that doesn't work for the RetroPie image, then you can try installing on-top of the Raspberry Pi OS Lite - Legacy image and manually install RetroPie on-top of it.

But are you sure the 1Gb cards are fine and they're not 'fake' cards with lesser capacity ? You can test them using something like F3 to make sure the capacity matches.

Sliver X

@HavronL said in Pi 4 will not boot 1024Gb with retropi img:

Alisinsen

I looked up Alisinsen on Amazon and they appear to be one of numerous fly-by-night SD card makers slinging fraudulent hardware. Nobody sells 1TB SD cards for $32, which means they're a scam.

If you're "lucky", it's actually a 512GB card with its firmware hacked to report double that. Most likely it's really 256GB or less with the same shenanigans involved.

None would give me any sort of confidence running one. Interesting things happen on cards like that once you exceed the real capacity of them.

HavronL

@Sliver-X Thank you -- Understood and lesson learned :-)

Sliver X

@HavronL

I hate that you had this happen to you, but if you can prove the capacity is bogus with a tool like F3 as mitu suggested you should be able to get a refund.

There is a legitimate NAND maker named Silicon Power that focuses on budget priced drives and cards: I'm currently using a few of their SD card models (A 128GB, 256GB and 512GB) along with half a dozen NVME and SATA drives for some PCs, and while they're not the most blazingly fast drives in their respective classes they are more than fast enough for a Raspberry Pi and have held up well so far (One is two years old now). Most importantly, they are really what they state they are in terms of capacity.

It looks like they have several 1TB SD card models now, the slowest/cheapest one currently going for around $55 (USD), which isn't really all that much more than the Alisensen "1TB" drives I'm seeing.

Realistically, around $32 USD (Currently) will get you a super nice 512GB micro SD card like a Samsung Evo or Sandisk Extreme.