@BuZz Thank you sir. That helps a lot.

I found the issue was with my USB to SD adapter. The image did contain partitions and windows detected a new USB storage device, halting the write operation. I had no issue when writing to SD on my laptop using a standard SD slot. Image is clean, well configured right out of the gate.

@ceruleansoul Here's how I successfully installed Retropie: Made sure I have a formatted SD card to FAT32. Follow the download instruction and installation for P2/P3 from this site: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/ That's all there is to it....