Copy RetroPie Image from 16GB MicroSD card to 8GB MicroSD Card

JCrew7384

Hi. Please ignore my NOOB question here. I got RetroPie installed and working great. Now I want to make a copy so I can bring to my brother's house. I have it currently installed on a 16GB card, and have an extra blank 8GB card. I am only using about 2GB of space on the image. And I am on Mac OSX. I have tried ApplePi-Baker, and it keeps crashing on restore. On Mac, I have tried making a disk image but it comes out at 16GB and then I can't put that onto the 8GB card, even though there's only 2GB of data.

Any help much appreciated!!!

herb_fargus

@JCrew7384 they have to be the same size of card or smaller so you can set it up on the 8GB and write that to the 16 GB or figure out how to repartitioning your card but I don't know how that will work with tools like apple pie baker

mediamogul

@JCrew7384

ApplePi-Baker has no option for this type of thing. In fact, I've never been able to find a good solution for this on OSX outside of a sparse file and that is not ideal in many situations, including this one. Honestly, your best bet is either going to be buying another 16GB card, or installing a fresh copy of RetroPie onto the 8GB card and re-configure everything while it's still fresh in your memory.

whsiung

@JCrew7384

I was asking for exactly the same thing. After some research a while back, I found out that I can do that in Pi!

Prerequisites:

An additional SD card installed with Raspbian. I will refer this card as technical card because this is the card that I keep to do dirty jobs, experiments etc.
A USB card reader, preferable one that can allow you to access 2 cards at the same time, so that you can do the cloning directly. i.e. https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digital-MobileLite-Multi-Function-FCR-MLG4/dp/B00KX4TORI

Instructions:

Backup the card that you're going to edit. Important if you do this for the 1st time. I'm very new to Raspbian or Linux, so I took that precaution - safety first :)
Boot your Pi with the technical card. Install "GParted".

sudo apt-get install gparted

It's a GUI based partition editing tool. You can shrink/move a disk partition with this power tool.

Attach the card reader with the card you're going to edit into one of the Pi's USB port.
Fire up GParted.
Make sure you select the correct card in the upper right dropdown list. In my case it's "sdc".

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pnphammkkiase31/2016-06-17-004736_1039x507_scrot.png

Unmount the partition that you're going to edit (in my case /dev/sdc2). You can do this right in the GUI. Highlight the partition and right click, choose "Unmount". Note that after this operation, the key right after the partition name will disappear.
After that partition goes offline, you can edit it by choosing "Resize/Move" from the same right click menu. Adjust the size to your liking.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9xye6da7eva80sc/2016-06-17-005026_552x298_scrot.png

Apply the change: Edit->Apply All Operations and wait for the writing to finish.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vjap5k5gxqntzww/2016-06-17-005125_1039x507_scrot.png

That's it.

EDIT:

I forget the last final step.

I am using this card reader:
https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digital-MobileLite-Multi-Function-FCR-MLG4/dp/B00KX4TORI

It can access 2 SD cards at the same time.

So I can clone sd card to sd card directly:

sudo dd bs=4M count=1280 if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sdd

sdc is the larger card, sdd is the smaller card (8GB).

Total cloning size is about 5GB (4M x 1280).