So I'm going to mark this one as [SOLVED] as what I posted above did seem to fix it. I'm still looking into my build more now to see if anything else might have been broken along the way, but for now, so far so good! Here's what I did.

I put my current SD card with the older OS into an older Pi 4.

From Emulation Station I pressed F4 to get into the terminal and typed:

sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

The update took about 40 minutes to complete.

Once I did that, I typed "emulationstation" into the terminal, and did a system shutdown from ES.

I then re-booted the now updated SD card to make sure it worked in the old Pi, and once it loaded up, I shut down from ES once again.

Took that updated SD card and put it into the new Pi 4 and it seemed to work just fine.

Immediately made a backup of that now working SD card! <-- VERY IMPORTANT!!!

The SD card now seems to work just fine in both the old Pi 4 and the new Pi 4.

I still don't quite understand why the old SD card won't work in the newer Pi 4's as I'm still using Debian Buster on both versions of the SD card. I also had no idea that there was any OS on the actual Pi board itself as I thought it was all contained within the SD card. I'm not exactly sure why my build wasn't working on the newer boards, but I'm at least happy I've found this work around.

@retropiecase said in How can i copy my retropie sd card to my computer:

@gomineko if i Backup is every setup lile scrapper or controller configuration the same ?

If you backup the SD image, it's a bit-for-bit duplicate of the entire SD card. This copies everything, updates, boot settings, installed packages...the mistyped commands in your bash history...everything. Just like you shut it off and just turned it back on again.

If you copy the roms, bios, and configs over the network share and then restore them to a fresh image, you will still keep most of your customizations (from the "configs" folder) but all your history, updates, etc. will be wiped clean and you will be starting fresh on those fronts.

@sleve_mcdichael
Thank you I will try this now

@vwcr Please post the solution you used so this topic may be of use to someone else who comes across it.

@rmbell34 I also use the 8BitDo SN30 Pro+. The problem with the Switch mode is, rumble/vibration/haptic feedback doesn’t work (for games that support this feature). This only works in Windows (X-Input) mode. For this mode to function properly, you need to install/update the xpadneo driver. This should fix the long loading times and can be done through the RetroPie-Setup script. However, in Windows mode the star and home buttons are not supported.

@mitu fixed

@tango Thanks for this comprehensive writeup. That's the spirit of a community. :)

For all coming accross this post: This guide works only for Rpi 3B+ (Note the +).

For other models suppporting USB mass storage boot see prerequites here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md

@colstar yeah that's understandable if you are new to this. My point is you don't even have to use a UBS stick to transfer ROMs. Can do it all with your PC and its not even a very technical process. But if you like the USB way that's cool

@tango said in SDCard Unreliable - Move all RP to USB card? Or fix SD?:

Or does it do that because I have no boot sector or boot programs on my USB stick?

If you haven't programmed the OTP bit for USB boot, the Pi will always boot from sdcard.

Sorry, we don't support 3rd party images or pre-sold 'consoles' . You'll have to ask the vendor/seller for support.

@mindwave

Win32DiskImager is what I use as well to backup my RPi images.

This site has an easy to follow guide: https://howchoo.com/g/nmexndnlmdb/how-to-back-up-a-raspberry-pi-on-windows

@busywait That did it. Thanks!

@mitu Ok, thanks)

@mitu Ok I will have a look on that. Thank you

@chrisw99 said in SD card write cycles:

It was more a generic question about the lifecycle of an SD card if it's in a Pi as there always seems to be stuff being written even when idle.

Things get written to logs when events happen - it's not an issue to cause excessive write tearing. Unless you have a problem which gets logged continuously in the logs (such as under-voltage warnings), the normal operation on a Pi will not negatiely impact the negatively the sdcard lifetime.

You could configure logging to RAM instead of persistent storage (with something like Log4Ram) if you wish.

@mitu

Thank you Mitu

Just thought about it since you mentioned the USB3 methods of storing and backing up roms

Thank you for the tip

@YFZdude

Thank you for advice

Also

Really appreciate the advice from everyone who commented on this post

Thank you all

I will try to be the most careful as I can while shopping online ;)