First of all, thanks for all the great work on RetroPie. I'm really looking forward to getting it up and running on my very first Raspberry Pi (3B+), but unfortunately I've hit many problems.

@BuZz said in Unable to work on 256Gb sd from scratch:

Note that the system will run a bit slower on the first boot while the filesystem is expanded to fit - it can take a little while on a larger card. Check /var/log/syslog for progress.

This was the cause of the mysterious filesystem corruption I kept encountering during my first 3-4 times trying to set up RetroPie. It runs asynchronously (so basically unknown to any first-time user), and it can slow the system down to the point of seeming unresponsive/hung, which makes the user more likely to interrupt it by hard power-cycling. And it takes a long time on larger microSD cards (mine is 256GB, and it took at least 20 minutes). This really needs to be called out in the "first install" instructions so that first-time users won't accidentally interrupt a critical process that they didn't even realize was happening.

And ideally, this would lead to a UX improvement in a future RetroPie release: on first boot, while the expansion is happening, the system should put up some modal UI to explain that an expansion is being performed, display some kind of busy/progress indicator while it's happening, and then wait for the expansion to complete successfully before loading up EmulationStation.