MiSTer FPGA Forum

The SD card that came with my MiSTer, I copied everything to a folder on my PC for backup.

I looked on this forum for recommendations for a 256 GB SD card, and even followed the link - to Amazon - and ordered it from there.

When it arrived, I formatted it, then copied the backup folder to the new SD card. I put it in the Primary SD card slot, turned on the MiSTer, and the screen stays black.

Did I do anything wrong?

You first have to install Linux/MISTer on the SD card and only after that you can copy you backup:
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_Mi ... etup-Guide

Did you prepare the micro SD with MiSTer Fusion? Only once you've done that can you copy your games directory back over to the correct partition.

You can try the SD Card Migration Utility for MiSTer but I don't have first hand experience with it.

Use Mr. Fusion. Once Mr. Fusion reboots you may have a black screen but you should not worry about that. Before doing anything else place the downloader and the update_all script in the Scripts directory. I think There is only the old update.sh there, DO NOT use it.
At that point you can copy your backup but be careful of what you have in this backup as there may be things you do not want to copy.
Post a list of what you have on your backup.
You will have to run the update all script, do not forget to go in the settings first, it will take a while as it will be the first run and it will check everything. At the end it will reboot as Linux, MISter and Menu are outdated. You may have to reconfigure things if you did not backup/restore the config directory.

insanityprawnboy wrote: ↑Tue Jan 10, 2023 7:34 pm

The SD card that came with my MiSTer, I copied everything to a folder on my PC for backup.

I looked on this forum for recommendations for a 256 GB SD card, and even followed the link - to Amazon - and ordered it from there.

When it arrived, I formatted it, then copied the backup folder to the new SD card. I put it in the Primary SD card slot, turned on the MiSTer, and the screen stays black.

Did I do anything wrong?

Well, you bought it from Amazon, for one thing. Amazon does 'stock mixing', so it's quite common for shady third parties to make fake SDs and ship them to Amazon's warehouse. Amazon totally trusts that everyone is honest and nobody would ever lie about what's in a package, so when you order that model of SD from them, they grab Shady Company X's product and ship it to you. SDs are easy to fake and very, very profitable, and Amazon is not interested in fixing this problem. So never, ever buy an SD from Amazon.

Both Walmart and Best Buy are fine. Bhphotovideo or Microcenter should also be fine.

edit: there's one model line of Sandisk cards that's manufactured only for Amazon, so that specific model line is safe to buy there. But I've forgotten the name.

I did it. The card works fine.

Thank you, folks.

Well, it's a 256GB card, and it worked fine when I put it in the MiSTer.

Except... after I wrote CloneImg to the card, it then made the card the same as the 8GB card I originally had, so I reformatted, and I tried it again, and clicked "Read Only Allocated Partitions" on Win32 Disk Imager, but I still couldn't add to it as it still didn't have the room.

I've reformatted it again now, and it's showing as 256GB again.

What did I do wrong?

What is Cloneimg?
Did you use Mr. Fusion?

jca wrote: ↑Thu Jan 12, 2023 5:30 pm

What is Cloneimg?
Did you use Mr. Fusion?

That's what I called the image of the SD card. I did what the guy did here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVyGcyw ... MilindDave

I downloaded Mr. Fusion, but I couldn't fit it on the SD card after I did that.

And I did that as I was struggling to follow the instructions so I asked a friend who works with computers what I should do. I don't want to keep bugging people here if I can help it. He provided me with that video. But now I'm thinking what was said in that video wasn't what I wanted to do.

On the github set up page, it says "Mr Fusion provides a compact image that you can download and flash onto an SD". Is that the one called ".gitkeep" in the images file on the Mr. Fusion download?

I really struggle with the instructions with this. I don't think I'm unintelligent, but trying to follow the instructions makes me feel that way.

I guess that if you cloned your card you will get the same exact thing after using whatever disk imager you used: an 8GB SD card with the rest going to waste.
You have to use the instructions we provided you and the link to Mr. Fusion.
I personally use Balena Etcher to make the SD card with Mr. Fusion.
Use it to Flash Mr. Fusion Image to the SD card. When done place the SD Card into MISTer and power it up. After this is done MISTer will reboot. If you get a black screen power down/up MISTer and it should be fine.
After that follow the instructions I posted earlier.

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/mr-fusion

These are the Mr Fusion Instructions. You simply download the img.zip file and then burn to a SD card using a SD card image tool. The Instructions give lnks to the suggested tools

FPGA64 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 12, 2023 5:57 pm

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/mr-fusion

These are the Mr Fusion Instructions. You simply download the img.zip file and then burn to a SD card using a SD card image tool. The Instructions give lnks to the suggested tools

Thank you. That worked.

I'm curious, do people often struggle at first with this?

insanityprawnboy wrote: ↑Thu Jan 12, 2023 6:27 pm

...
I'm curious, do people often struggle at first with this?

If they read carefully the instructions: NO.

When folks understand what an SD image is, they don't usually have problems, but if they don't, they can end up confused.

An SD card is just a long sequence of bytes, effectively. When you partition and format an SD, it's sort of like building a bunch of shelves and a card catalog to track files, somewhat like a library. As files are written onto the 'shelves' (arbitrary byte blocks on the drive), the card catalog is kept updated. That's how you can have many files and directories stored in an arbitrary byte sequence; some of the bytes are defined as tracking structures for the rest of them.

A card image is created by literally reading the bytes, in order, from the storage device, and writing them to a file. Everything comes along that way, including partition and file layout information. You're copying the library, not by taking the books off the shelves, but by making a copy of every brick in the building, every shelf, and every book, and reassembling it somewhere else.

Burning an SD image is going the other way; it's taking a file and blasting it into the SD card. It starts at byte 0 and overwrites bytes until the image is exhausted. If those bytes have a partition layout and filesystem(s) on them, voila, you've now got a new live filesystem on the USB key. This totally deletes anything that was on the SD to begin with; even if the shelves aren't overwritten, the card catalog is thoroughly destroyed.

The Mr. Fusion image is much smaller than most SDs, so when it boots up, it will resize the too-small partition layout to encompass the whole disk. It modifies its own partition layout directly, which is not normally done, but is obviously possible. When you first burn the image to a card, it will look like the disk is only 2GB, no matter how big the card is. After you boot it up and let it install, it will expand itself and report the full size of the card.

You were working at the filesystem level, trying to put the image as a named file onto the existing filesystem, when you wanted to be destroying the existing partitions and filesystems by overwriting them with the image.