Or maybe I overlooked, or jumped the gun on what was the problem. If you see the pretty rainbow screen then you wrote the image correctly. It may be very likely as I was reminded in the forums that there are different versions of the retropie image that will work for the different raspberry pi models. The pi 1/zero are bundled up into one image and the pi 2/3 are bundled into a different image, with older images not supporting the pi3b+. I don't know about the 1b+

@mitu Ah, ok. :) @grant2258 Thanks!

I don't know what causes the SD cards to fail all of the sudden but the two I've had fail wound up having a hairline split in them and folded in half when I played with them. I don't know if it's from heat and then taking them out and putting stress on them but both failures were physical damage

@mitu Certainly noted. I honestly never really drew a distinction between both sets of info. I just always assumed one was as good as the other. As I said, I'll definitely keep it in mind and use the pretty docs page for future reference.

@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.

@mitu @spaceman Yeah, it just gets in the way. If you want Raspbian, write that image. NOOBS is a waste of space and a PITA.