RetroPie Installation Transfer

[aclx-ks]

I installed RetroPie on my Raspberry Pi and have configured it with custom screensavers, sounds, bootscreens, etc. Now I want to install it on a USB drive for use on PC. I created a backup of the Raspberry Pi installation in the form of an image file -OS and all. My plan is to make a new Ubuntu image and copy many of the files over. Finally, I will write my new (Ubuntu) image to a USB drive as a bootable device.

My question is - Can I just replace the entire contents of the RetroPie folder on my Ubuntu image with the contents of the RetroPie folder from the Rasperry Pi image? Or will this not work? Obviously, I wouldn't try to manually merge the folders unless I need to. I can do that though, I would just need to know which files to merge/overwrite. I need a little help deciding which files are part of the RetroPie installation so that I don't break everything in the process.

Thank you for the advice.

[mitu]

Here is a topic discussing the migration to a new system - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/16866/migrating-a-working-retropie-setup-to-the-new-stretch-image/. It's meant for a Pi based system, but you can skip the specifics (i.e. no cmdline.txt on PC, I think there's no boot splashscreen, etc.).

[aclx-ks]

Thanks for this! What I'm seeing is that I will also want to check /etc/emulationstation and /opt/retropie/configs. However, I'm still wondering... Is it safe to copy the entire RetroPie folder at /home/RetroPie? Or does this folder contain any version specific code that, if overwritten, will cause RetroPie not to function correctly?

[mitu]

@aclx-ks said in RetroPie Installation Transfer:

Is it safe to copy the entire RetroPie folder at /home/RetroPie?

You didn't mentioned which version are you running currently, but I think it should be safe. One thing I wouldn't copy over would be the roms/retropie subfolder, since that's managed by the RetroPie itself and would be created anyway by the installer.