I have been using Clonzilla for years and it never let me down.

I run it from an live USB stick on my Desktop PC. It has some learning curve but you will find a lot of tutorials online. Running "disk to local image" to backup and "local image to disk" to restore with the defaults should be enough as a start.

As long as the source hardware from where you make the backup and the target restore hardware are the same make and model it should go smooth (i.e. Rpi4 -> Rpi4, SD-card make and model can differ but obviously the size of the target should be same as source or larger).

I assume you only use the SD card for RetroPie and not a mix of SD-card and SSD drive for RetroPie.

Do you use a SD-Card reader via USB in your Desktop PC or is the SD card directly put into the PC's SD-card reader? (I am asking as I have seen USB SD-Card readers failing).

@mitu I used Eatcher also for cloning, I wanted to try out all the possibilities.
source disk:primary.jpg

destination disk:destination disk.jpg

as you said partuuid are different . I changed partuuid into cmdline and fstab and it works. the drive starts up with no problem.
Thank you for your help!!! You are the master!!!

@mitu

Ohhhh thanks. Yup I would have totally been making a “how do I fix this” thread if you hadn’t said that.

@mitu The problem I was having with Win32DiskImager was getting an error dialog box when trying to open the SD card device. It was a "cannot lock volume" error.

Turns out this is a big problem with Windows (10 in my case). Some applications (typically music players or photo catalogers) traverse the file system looking for things and can have things open on your "boot" drive letter so you can't use it.

I was finally able to get it to work using a fresh laptop machine. So if you have this problem you might be able to find out who has files open on your SD card using Microsoft's "process explorer" program and close that program or be forced to another Windows instance.

I'm doing testing with my "dd" idea now that I have media I can experiment with.

Thanks!!

@greenhawk84

That's a very nice trick. Until now, I was under the impression that AdvanceMAME was the only arcade emulator where the BIOS files and clones could reside away from a main ROM grouping. Thanks for sharing this.

to answer your second question, i've had good results with this shader set: https://github.com/aybe/RetroArch-shaders

just grab the .glsl & .glslp files for the ones you want and drop them in ~/.config/retroarch/shaders

@battlecat One way to do this would be to do the following:

Scrape all of your roms to make sure all are listed in the gamelist.xml file. Manually edit the gamelist.xml file (usually located in ~/.emulationstation/gamelists/<system>) to remove the unwanted roms. From the main emulationstation screen, push start, then find the option in the menu that says "Parse gamelist.xml file only" or something like that. Reboot your system, then enjoy!

This is how I hide the various bios files as well. Of note, if you add a new system or rom, you'll have to disable the "Parse gamelist.xml" option to see the new roms, unless you've scraped them already.

Good luck!

@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!

I tried to do the same actions, and then I tried to fix it by this tutorial but it didn't help me anyway. what else could you suggest? thanks

@MajorDangerNine Thanks - I'll check it out.

@mediamogul I am going to try and test these this weekend before adding them all the list but it is a very good list indeed.