Strange cloned RetroPie Image issue!

[Freakadude]

Hi,

I have a 128gb RetroPie image that i use of which i have made couple of image backups using win32diskimager. I have restored this image just fine to my own SD card and to a friends SD card (same brand and type) a couple of times in the past.

Now i am making a RetroPie system for a friend and again i use the exact same type and make of SD card as i have and when i restore the image onto this blank SD card and the system just does not boot but gives me an error. (see attached pictures).

Now i ruled out that the SD card is faulty because i flashed a vanilla Retropie image just fine which also booted. I also checked that the PI3 board of the friend is fine because it booted up my own SD card just fine (which has the same image as the one i try to write onto the new SD card).

So basically i am at a loss of what to do here since restoring the image worked just fine in the past but will not work in this instance and i have no clue why.

Can anyone who has maybe experienced the same issue or does know what the error message means help me out here? I really really would not like to want to start building the SD card from scratch as that would take a ton of time so i would prefer if the restore function would work just as fine as it did before.

Appriciate any help!

[meleu]

@Freakadude Please do not post a support request without first reading and following the advice in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

Pay a special attention at the item 5 of that post:

5. Make sure you are using an official image, or have done a manual install yourself. We will not support 3rd party images.

[Freakadude]

This is a self backup and restore issue/question. Since i figure i am probably not the only one that does backups of the system via win32diskimager i thought this was an innocent enough question. But i guess not. I guess quoting rules (that have nothing to do with my issue) is more important then to help a fellow man.

Thanks for the help....

[megafacehead]

Hey man

I'm sorry i can't help all i can do is sympathize.

I'm making images from friends also based on all my work but my main problem seems to be writing a 128gb image, and then buying an identical card (same brand size etc) and then have the image not fit on the card, misses out by a few bytes.

I've never struck your problem before.But i'm not an old hand at this.

Don't loose hope, i think meleu may have just assumed you were doing the dodgey- i've found almost everyone on this board extremely helpful, just hang tight.

But i'll save you time and get the first obligatory question out of the way-have you tried writing the image to ANOTHER card (not your original and not your friends card it wigs out on)?
I know you said it shouldn't be hardware related as you mentioned writing a stock image to it but...the question will be asked regardless.

[DarkWolf]

@Freakadude I already had the same issue. Sadly it turned out that the sd card misses some bytes and the os can't handle it because the sd card should be bigger...

You could use a partition manager and resize the data partition (make sure the data "protection" is on) down 100mb or something like that, that should fix it (it did for me once though)

[meleu]

@Freakadude said in Strange cloned RetroPie Image issue!:

This is a self backup and restore issue/question.

Sorry for assuming you were using a 3rd party image. I hope our fellows posts above helped you.

Cheers!