[SOLVED] First time booting and not working

BuZz

Your SD card is corrupt. If this happens every time you write, it could be

a) Your RetroPie image is corrupt / incomplete (re-download ?)
b) Your card is faulty

BuZz

just to clarify - people are talking about formatting as fat32 etc - the only reason to format would be for a an application or OS that is daft enough to not allow you to write to a drive without it having a driver letter etc. The actual image contains the partition table and partitions. Any existing partitions data will be gone when the image is written.

The tool @whsiung mentioned sounds a bit more intelligent, and so there should be no need to format the sdcard at all.

Nalkozz

@BuZz
Thank you for your answer :)

I don't know if it's the card or the image file. I'll try to re-download the image file and "burn" it with WinFLASHTool. If it doesn't work, I'll try to install a raspbian distro and run the retropie setup script from it. :)

BuZz

That won't help if the card is faulty though. Perhaps you can provide me with the md5sum / name / filesize of the image and I will tell you if it's ok. If so we can rule that out.

Nalkozz

@BuZz
name: retropie-v3.8.1-rpi2_rpi3.img
size: 2,734,375 Ko
MD5Sum: 335fa2eed9f94a9caaf29ac0293ecfa6
I hope my card isn't faulty! D:

BuZz

Checksum is correct. So either it is not being written correctly (somehow), the card is faulty, or the card is just incompatible. First thing would be to try another card.

Nalkozz

I'll see if I find another one in my home. If not, I need to buy a new card tomorrow :/
I'll tell you when the test is ran with another card.

[EDIT]: No more microSD card at home, so I tried to install a raspbian and then the setup script. Raspbian worked well util I expand the filesystem and reboot. The error I got is "not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,2)".
I did a surface test on my card to see if all the clusters are ok, and they are, so I don't think the card is corrupted or faulty. Maybe an incompatibility with the raspberry Pi 3 ?
I'll buy a new card tomorrow, maybe just a 32 Gb for testing and why not for mt project, even I wanted a 64 Gb capacity :/

[EDIT AGAIN]: Even if I don't expand the root filesystem, I got the same error on reboot. Definitely need to buy another card for tessting purpose AND for my project.

Btw, thank you very much for your help BuZz !

Nalkozz

Finally, I have a retropie which is working very well !
As expected, that was the card which was faulty.

For information, that was a Toshiba Exceria 64 Gb UHS-I U1 Class 10. I bought a brand new Emtec Gold+ 64 Gb UHS-I U1 Class 10, and everything is working well with it.

Thanks for your help guys! :)

BuZz

If the previous card works ok on the PC and only has problems on the RPI, you should report the problem to https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware - they may be able to give some options to test with (editing config.txt before putting the card in the RPI), and it might help improve compatibility.

Nalkozz

@BuZz
It's a very good idea, I'll make some tests on my pc before, and then report the problem if everything is fine with it. Thank you very much!