@sleve_mcdichael This is exactly what I was looking for. I installed Retropie and about 100 NES, SNES ROMS, themes etc. on a 256 card but looking to do USB rom service on NESPI 4 case on a 256 SSD. Thought I would be able to make an image and then install it on a 128 card but no, Win32diskimager says the card is too small. I thought there is no freaking way this card was too small but now I know it copied the unused sectors too.
Thanks for tip about PiShrink! You hopefully saved me $40 on another SD card! Thanks again!

Sorry, just my honest opinion.

@VictimRLSH said in Cloning my retro SD i impossible:

There is also a thread in General Discussion and Gaming about where to find legally downloadable content for free too.

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/10918/where-to-legally-acquire-content-to-play-on-retropie

🙂

@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.

I’ve used this to copy from a 128g card to a 64g one before to create another Retropie for someone. Worked fine for me apart from having to run it twice just to make sure everything really was copied, but that was just a delta copy then.

https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone

I plugged the other SD card into a USB adapter and just let it run overnight as I was close to about 60g in actual use.

Thanks, tried Apple Pie Baker back in the days but thought it was for creating images. Will check it out!

@mitu

Hello,

I had the same problem when making the backup, it would be interesting to add these notes in:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Updating-RetroPie/#making-a-backup
Change "Make sure you have the correct drive letter for your SD card!" to "Make sure you have the correct drive letter for your SD card! (Choose the partition which is readable by Windows, 'boot' as the source of the backup)" or something similar.

Thank you.

@RossiPosse

Rather than removing it, it always helps to share your solution with others. To that end, the first menu option in the raspi-config will expand the filesystem on the SD card.

I've determined the problem was bad USB ports on my thunderbolt breakout hub. For some reason ApplePi-Baker doesn't notice that something went wrong and tells the user that the operation was successful. When I do it directly from my iMac's USB port, it took around an hour and the RetroPie is booting up successfully. This will now be the second time I have to return my OWC thunderbolt interface. :( Thanks for your help!