@Clyde Wasn't aware of that tool. Cheers.

@BuZz Thank you sir. That helps a lot.

@drb

I created an account to say thanks and to also say I had better luck using "Rufus" to perform the iso to usb step.

That ISO to USB tool just didn't want to work for me.

Gparted was straight forward and I was able to resize my partition of my img so it would fit on another card.

Thanks again!!!

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....