Okay, so after some more searching I found out that the screen I'm seeing is the Raspberry Pi bootloader. I can disable it's appearance by editing it's configuration but I'm still concerned about the error message.

Should I worry it can't find "recovery.elf" and "recovery4.elf"?

By the way, I can still boot into RetroPie just fine play games.

@ClassicGMR That's another rule: "Never do anything stupid without a backup (including not making the backup)."

Thanks for your help, that worked👍 I’m still getting a boot text tho (which I want to hide) I recently installed a music player to play while in the emulation station. In the autostart.sh file, it reads..
while pgrep omxplayer >/dev/null; do sleep 0; done
(sleep 5; mpg123 -Z /home/pi/bgm/*.mp3 >/dev/null 2>&1) &
emulationstation —no-splash

@mubonassi It might have been useful to provide that information beforehand, but glad that you got it sorted out in the end.

@justcarp Please don't reply to 3 years old topics. Open a separate topic and ask your question, referencing this topic if needed.