Question on uninstalling without script

MikeRL

So I tried the uninstall script from RetroPie inside of my Raspbian install. NOT A GOOD IDEA. Lost a lot of core packages and wasn't able to recover all of them. Had to do a format. Is there any manual way to uninstall RetroPie for troubleshooting without losing any packages? Thanks.

Clyde

AFAIK Retropie resides in the following directories:

/opt/retropie
$HOME/Retropie
$HOME/Retropie-Setup
$HOME/.emulationstation

The latter is a hidden symlink to /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation.

The removal of these directories should "uninstall" Retropie except for any packages that were installed by it via Raspbian's package management. But those shouldn't take much space on your system drive nor interfere with any other application.

The simplest way to remove said directories would be the following console command, executed from the user account who installed Retropie in the first place.

USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK!

sudo rm -r /opt/retropie $HOME/Retropie $HOME/Retropie-Setup $HOME/.emulationstation

If that causes a lot of queries, -rf instead of -r will execute the command without any user interaction. But you should only do that if you're 100% sure you didn't make any typing error. sudo rm will delete everything with root privileges that you tell it to, even by accident.

If I made any mistake or overlooked something that could/should be removed also, I'd be happy to be corrected or complemented. I would advice you, @MikeRL, to wait one or two days if someone does so. Either way, a full backup of your system before such a potentially dangerous task is highly recommended.

BuZz

The uninstall should only removes packages and dependencies if you want it to.

Do you want to remove all the system packages that RetroPie depends on?

WARNING: this will remove packages like SDL even if they were installed before you installed RetroPie - it will also remove any package configurations - such as those in /etc/samba for Samba.

If unsure choose No (selected by default).

Did you choose yes to this?