I'd say that it's most likely broken and became read-only, thus the inability to erase the partition table and create a new one (re-partition).

@itsmelos

When you write the RetroPie image to the SD card, it is creating two partitions.
The first is a boot partition in FAT32 filesystem that is about 250MB as you have already seen.
The second is a GNU/Linux partition in the ext filesystem. Windows will not see this unless you install special software. But that is okay, we really don't need Windows to see it.

As soon as you are done writing the image to the card, just stop and don't let Windows format anything. Insert the card into your Pi 4 and start it up.

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/

@leanne No problem. The unallocated space will actually be expanded on first boot of Retropie and brought into use. The image you download is compressed you see, so that there is not wasted empty space in it.

done. I hope now the post is more understandable

Sure is.

The date format is controlled by the theme, defaulting to MM/DD/YYYY if not specificed. You can add a format specifier by modifying the theme and adding

<format>%d/%m/%Y</format>

to the md_releasedate element used by the theme.

Thanks!

Topics merged.
@ljpavey please don't post multiple topics with the same issue/support request, just 1 day apart.

@mitu I wanted to circle back, you were right. In the terminal, I typed df -h / this got me the info on the SD card. So, that resulted in 118gb Space, 113gb used, 0 Space available, 100% used up.

I thought this was odd, my SD card should be close to 128gb. Anyways, I deleted a bunch of games, etc and ran the same command and got the following:

118gb space, 103gb used, 10gb space avail., used 92%

So like I said, you were right!

Thanks!

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.