Issue with writing Retro pi img to SD card

BigBoss

I've been trying to simply write the Retropi img to my SD card for the past 2 days, and have no idea what I'm doing wrong. Here's what I've done in order:

I formatted my 8gb sandisk sd to FAT through a usb to sd adapter (Which has successfully installed retro pi before)
I downloaded the .gz file and extracted the img file from it
I used Win32DiskImager to write the retropi img to my sd card
I put it in my Raspberry pi 3B and nothing happens

I have managed to get it to work before but decided to wipe the sd card and start over again now that I know how to use it, but it just stopped working completely. The pi has a solid red light, if that means anything.

Please let me know if I need to give anymore details, I'm not entirely sure what needs to be known for this sort of thing.

Thanks in advance

Edit: I realized that because the sd card is plugged into my adapter, it is appearing as a usb drive. I'm writing to the image right now, and will update when the write is complete.

Edit: Changing where I was writing made no difference. Please help!

rbaker

@bigboss said in Issue with writing Retro pi img to SD card:

I realized that because the sd card is plugged into my adapter, it is appearing as a usb drive.

Are you saying that you have plugged the newly imaged sd card into a usb adaptor and are trying to boot? You have to plug the sd card into the sd card slot.

BigBoss

@rbaker I use a usb adapter to write to the card. The card is correctly inserted into the pi

BobHarris

@bigboss And you also wiped the card back to it's full size? I had quite a bit of trouble getting rid of the Linux partition on my Windows laptop when I wanted to rewrite an image to it. The easiest solution for me was to format the card in my camera. (And then I'd format it again with sdformatter 4.0.)
I don't know if this can cause the issue you are having. You are doing the right steps, so aside from a faulty sd reader on your Pi I'm clueless on what else can cause this boot issue.

KN4THX

I had an issue similar and I opened Windows disk management (diskmgmt.msc from a run or cmd prompt) and deleted the partition or partitions (2 usually, boot and the other I cannot remember). Both would obviously combine to one again and work.

I don't know know why I had this issue for so long but basically it wasn't formatting the card, just a partition on the card which I can not seem to replicate. I hope this isn't your issue, but there it is just in case.

rbaker

@bigboss Try etcher instead of Win32 disk imager.

AndrewH

@rbaker : I don't think that's likely to help - of all the components involved in this problem, Win32DiskImager is probably the one that can be most relied on.

@BigBoss : Does Win32DiskImager report that it has successfully written to the card?
If so, are you then able to see two new drives in Explorer (maybe E: and F:)?
If so, you should be able to access one of them, but not the other.
A Yes to all of the above would suggest that the SD card is probably ok, although it would still be useful if you had a second card that you could test with.

If you put the SD card in the Pi and switch it on, do you only see the red LED lighting? Does the green LED light at all?
If you're not seeing the green LED, that suggests that the Pi is not even trying to read from the card, and you would need to check things like whether your power supply is delivering enough current.