Prebuilt retropie images not booting

GonzoPi

Hi all, new to the forum and looking for some advice.

I've had a pi3B for a little over a year now gathering dust in a drawer and recently a friend came over with his own pi3B running a prebuilt retropie image and it reinvigorated my retro gaming spirit.

I've since bought myself a couple of (real looking ) 128gb SanDisk MicroSD cards from amazon and tried imaging them a couple of times but on both occasions the pi refuses to boot.

I'm using SD Card Formatter initially on the cards, then guiformatter to change the cards to FAT32, then I'm using Win32DiskImager to write retropie images to the cards.

The two images I've tried so far are virtualman_128gb_retropi3-emulationstatiom_v2.0-build and 128gb-PiStation.v1.0-Retropie to no avail.

My current theory is that the cards I've bought are fakes and the data won't write to them properly because they're not the size specified or just bad quality.

I'm just wondering if I'm missing something stupid, like do I need to pre-flash the cards with raspbian or some such before writing the images themselves?

FYI the cards display as having 125gb free space which seems suspiciously large for 128gb card, and I'm currently running an H2test on it which you can imagine is taking and age on a card that size.

I've tried booting using my old card that's running raspbian and it works fine too so nothing wrong with the hardware I don't think.

Thanks in advance for any all help/advice

Gonzo

wmarcio

@GonzoPi Hi, how are you? Usually this forum does not provide help for third-party images, you need to see who made this image. Sorry.

GonzoPi

@wmarcio my apologies, I only included the specific images to be as precise as possible, if I deleted the post and reposted without reference to those specific images would that be more appropriate?

Thorr69

@GonzoPi said in Prebuilt retropie images not booting:

@wmarcio my apologies, I only included the specific images to be as precise as possible, if I deleted the post and reposted without reference to those specific images would that be more appropriate?

It's not about appropriate; it's about the fact that those are not official RetroPie products. They are repackaged with with copyrighted material and violate the user license. Unless you are trying to install an official image, you won't get help here.