MiSTer FPGA Forum

I like to reinstall Windows every year or two, even macOS needs a fresh install every now and then. I realized the other day that I still have the original install on my MiSTer from 4+ years ago when I first bought it.

1) Is there any benefit to backing everything up, wiping the microsd card and reinstalling everything?
2) Would simply deleting the.ini files (and a few other files?) achieve the same result?
3) For #2 above, which files should be deleted and re-downloaded/re-installed?

Thanks for your help!

Are you experiencing any issues? I would recommend buying a second SD card and reinstalling on that before I hosed a perfectly good MiSTer installation.

No issues whatsoever, just want to make sure everything is running optimally. I’m guessing there is no benefit to reinstalling so I might try downloading the latest MiSTer.ini.

There's no reason to do this at all. This "need" for reinstalls is because crud accumulates on some systems. It doesn't happen on MiSTer. Worst you could get is fragmentation on your exFAT volume but that's irrelevant on an SD card.

The .ini file has changed substantially over the years. It won't hurt to install the latest one, just make sure you back up the original.

Unless you're solving a specific problem, there's little real reason to do this. There are many ways your system could benefit from it, but if they aren't something you'd notice, then what's the point. Reinstalling everything also comes with a huge downside of losing all your core configurations; video/audio filters, controller mappings etc.

Things I can think of you could do instead of a reinstall:

• Unmount /media/fat and run fsck.exfat on it to ensure filesystem consistency.
• Merging your configuration with the latest stock .ini is a good idea, as suggested earlier.
• See the various scripts under /media/fat/Scripts if there's something you're missing. Does your NIC have a unique MAC address? Do you have local SSL certificate store updated? Have you changed your root password?

In general it's a good idea to familiarise yourself a bit with the basic filesystem layout. MiSTer is not a terribly complicated system, unlike Windows and macOS.

Thanks for the feedback! I didn’t think a reinstall would provide any benefits but I wanted to be sure. I’ll simply backup my .ini files and rebuild my settings using the latest version .ini

Reinstalling is a thing that comes mostly from Windows culture, where poorly written uninstallers may leave behind drivers that bloat the system, or files that occupy hard disk space. There's also the issue that over time, disk fragmentation results in increased seek times, but that's only an issue on HDDs, not on SSDs or µSDs.

You don't uninstall stuff on MiSTer (or if you do, it's easy to delete the specific files), and it uses µSD, so neither of these is actually a problem.