@collcroc123 That's normal. Once you start the system, the 2nd partition will be expanded to fill up the free space (that shows up as Unallocated). The 1st partition is the boot partition, only holding the necessary files to start the system and then the actual OS and its files will be on the 2nd partition.

@collcroc123 the systems don't appear in emulation station until you put ROMs the their folders Not sure why it's booting you to the command line...

@qu9ke RetropPie will not use the FAT32 formatted partition to store the data. It doesn't matter if your SD card is formatted or not. If you write the RetroPie image on the card, you'll see that will create 2 partitions a small Fat32 partition to hold the boot files and boot configuration a larger Linux partition that will actually hold the system, including the ROMs, emulators, etc. This partition will be automatically expanded on 1st boot to fill in the rest of your SD card. So yes, you're overthinking it. Just write the RetroPie image on the SD card and start your Raspberry Pi.

@rogerde said in Help formatting SD card.: My son is getting his raspberry pi set up but when inserting 32g micro SD card in computer it comes up with 2 drive letters, f and g. Is there a way of making the card just have one drive letter. Both drive letters have different memory sizes. That's correct. To simplify, there's a boot partition and a storage partition. The boot partition contains much of the underlying OS and kernel stuff and the storage partition contains all the dependencies, emulators, where your ROMs are stored etc. It's a pretty common format for bootable images. Its probably possible to put it all on one partition but it requires a pretty technical know how. The real question is what is he trying to accomplish by plugging the SD into the computer? If it's just to write the retropie image, software like etcher will still recognise the SD as one device even if it's partitioned and will overwrite the whole SD with a fresh retropie image and will have two partitions. If you just want to format first as a formality anyways, sdformatter is a useful software for that but I also think etcher might have a simple format option too. If you're just looking to transfer ROMs, the standard method of ROM transfer/interaction is done via the network or USB as described in the documentation: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/#transferring-roms

@mitu looks like it went well. A big thank you! Now I can sleep better at night ;-)

Thanks for the reply. I did notice something else. Before I flash the image file to the SD card, the format of the SD card is in fact FAT32. After the image is written, it is FAT (not 32). Could this be an issue?

@Sano you got me. I'm trying to keep in simple for ones that don't know what's going on. :)

@ckp +1 for ExFAT. There's no downside compared with FAT32, which it was designed to replace, so you might as well. If you're only using specific computers, you could alternatively install software on them to allow them to all to read NTFS (or Mac format drives for that matter). That would offer a slight advantage in that these support longer filenames (ExFAT filenames are limited to a max of 16 characters IIRC), which can sometimes be handy when working with audio. But of course if you want to use the drive in any other machines, you'd need to install software, or copy the files across (Mac can read but not write to NTFS). I know some way to format the usb drive as exFAT or NTFS or more. Step 1: Plug the flash drive into the USB port. Step 2: Launch a Finder window. Step 3: Run Disk Utility. Step 4. Choose a format for your flash drive. Step 5. Format your flash drive. When you has too many files,you also can try to use iMac-Cleaner File Shredder . You can use it to delete confidential files on your Mac, external hard drives, and SD cards as well. Read more:https://www.imymac.com/file-shredder/how-to-format-a-flash-drive-on-mac.html

So I played around a bit, got a new SD card with the image on it.. did all the typical tweaks (enable wifi, disable overscan). I then followed the guide up to editing the fstab. Plugged in the UUID appropriate for my drive, and used this command: UUID=******** /home/pi/RetroPie ntfs rw,exec,uid=pi,gid=pi,umask=022 0 2 Essentially, I'm using the vfat example in the guide, and just changed it to ntfs. The rest of the options I'm not sure what are for, but it looks like user permissions (like read/write/execute/etc) for the path and it's specifying the user as pi so I left that in there from the example. I'm not sure about the umask bit, so I just left it too. If somebody can clarify on what all those are, I'll edit my setting if needed. But for the most part, it looks like it's working. I was SFTP'd into the Pi prior to rebooting. I could access /home/pi and everything else on the system just fine, but not /home/pi/retropie. However, after rebooting, that last /retropie/ bit opened up and gave me access to things like the bios and roms subfolders. So I'm assuming that means the automount DID work. The only way I'll know for sure is if I transfer in bunch of files over 8gb, because that's the limit of my SD card. :)

@dualshock0101 Please do not post a support request without first reading and following the advice in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

@Timmiejane Thank you, that's not the one I had. Mine was the same, but it was .img, not .img256

@herb_fargus Thanks, never tried it that way. I always format to ensure that the full size of the card is made available. Does Win32DiskImager know if you have a 32 GB card with a previous Retropie Install on? If so, I shall no longer format first.