hi sorry, i'm an idiot, I noticed that I have retropie sd-card in my sd reader

@mitu I thought I did exactly that, but I nuked everything and started fresh.

Seems to be working now! I don’t know what I did wrong initially.

Thank you so much.

@djshenanigans You can use the File Manager (from the RetroPie system in EmulationStation) to copy your ROMs to the SD card, from the USB stick. Just rename the retropie-mount folder on the USB, so it's not automatically mounted over the ROMs folder by RetroPie. After plugging in the USB stick, the files there should be available under /media/usb0.

Yes thx herb I am. Booting from an OLDEN 1TB hardrive that was top of the line a long time ago. I tried easus. waste of time. I tried mini partition tool. Nop. Only thing that worked? gParted. FTW!
fdisk -l shows

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 8192 124927 116736 57M e W95 FAT16 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 124928 1953523711 1953398784 931.5G 83 Linux

Moral of the story just use gPared. Everythig else is a waste of time.