wont boot correctly

backstander

when i boot up my pi it goes to the consoole instead of retropie. it worked the first few times i booted it but now it wont work.

We'll need more information to be of any help:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

If I was guessing, it could be a corrupt SD card (might be a generic brand SD card...those suck!) or maybe it doesn't have the correct power adapter
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/#hardware

how do i open emulation station?

Type this at the command prompt:
nohup emulationstation &

jukeltruck

@backstander it still wont open

backstander

@jukeltruck

it still wont open

Does it say anything when you try to launch EmulationStation?

You can try reinstalling/updating everything that's already installed by running this:
sudo /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh

Just pick "Update All Installed Packages"

Source document:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Updating-RetroPie/

jukeltruck

@backstander ill give you all the information about what happened, the first couple times i boot up it works fine. i expand image (which everyone says to do) , then i downlaod basic packages, then i get kodi. then i restart emulation station. when it boots back up at first it still gives the retropie logo but once its loaded in where normally it would be in the game selection menu, its on a console screen. On the left there is a joystick made out of asterisks,and at the top there is green code that says; Friday, 3 march 2017, 2:17:16 am UTC
Linux 4.4.26-v7+ armv71 GNU/Linux

then gives me various readouts of differant data such as IP, temperature, uptime, memory, and running processes. under all those it says;
The RetroPie project, https://retropie.org.uk

then the consoles "pi@retropie:~$

(some people said to rewrite the image so i did, and just like last time, it worked the first 2 times but the times after that it wouldnt boot into retropie. i tried what you said
"nohup emulationstation &" to which it says [1] 898, and then under that in the console it says, nohup: ignoring input and appending output to nohup.out

i entered what you just said and the pi says, command not found

backstander

@jukeltruck
I'm afraid you might have a bad SD card. Can you re-image on a different SD card?

v1ncent

looks like i have this same problem.
did you find the solution yet ?

jukeltruck

@v1ncent i have found the solution, not the sd card

v1ncent

@jukeltruck what did you do to fix it ?

jukeltruck

@v1ncent sudo apt install libvlc5

backstander

@jukeltruck
Glad you where able to figure this one out. I double checked my system and I already had libvlc5 installed. For others reading this, this is what you type in to install it:
sudo apt-get install libvlc5