STICKY: PINN - An enhanced version of NOOBS.

[DarrenHill]

Quick question - is there any way to backup a retropie install?

I've got 3.3.4.3 set up how I want it now, as a dual-boot with Raspbian/Pi OS and Retropie 3 on a Pi3 with 32GB uSD. I can back up the Raspbian partitions fine, but if I try the Retropie one it gives the pop-up that an unsupported OS is detected (same window as others have posted above) for Retropie3.

Aside from that all is working fine, would just like to secure a backup of both OS's in case of issue or if I need to rebuild.

[procount]

I think Retropie should work, but looks like something is awry. I'll check it out.

[procount]

@DarrenHill - Reboot PINN twice whilst connected to the internet. Then you should be able to backup Retropie.

[DarrenHill]

@procount - thanks for that. Backup of Retropie3 is currently running...

[procount]

Don't forget to test it by installing to a new drive before you rely on it.

[DarrenHill]

That's the plan for this weekend, once I can dig out a spare SD card to rebuild the overall image onto.

[procount]

PINN has been updated to v3.3.4.4

V3.3.4.4

• Bugfix - Fix partition labels when replacing OS (#418)

[bonzer2u]

I have a couple large retropie distros (64 and 128gb) and a significantly tweeked twister 1.7 (32gb), all sd cards that I have been swapping in and outa my Pi4-4gb that I would like to consolidate on a just arrived 1 TB usb-ssd.

I would like to install PINN on the ssd and migrate the sd cards to it and understand that these 'custom' os installs likely need to be tar-balled before they can be installed into PINN.

My question is would it be possible to 'clone' the individual sd's, (offline of course in a usb reader) into the PINN installed ssd drive as another option for this situation?

[RonR]

I have a couple large retropie distros (64 and 128gb) and a significantly tweeked twister 1.7 (32gb), all sd cards that I have been swapping in and outa my Pi4-4gb that I would like to consolidate on a just arrived 1 TB usb-ssd.

I would like to install PINN on the ssd and migrate the sd cards to it and understand that these 'custom' os installs likely need to be tar-balled before they can be installed into PINN.

My question is would it be possible to 'clone' the individual sd's, (offline of course in a usb reader) into the PINN installed ssd drive as another option for this situation?

If it turns out PINN won't accommodate your needs, take a look at MultiBoot. I've tested it with RetroPie and TwisterOS (make sure they're updated so they will boot on an RPi-4 USB device). Simply use image-backup to create image files of your SD cards and stack them all on a single SSD.

[procount]

I have a couple large retropie distros (64 and 128gb) and a significantly tweeked twister 1.7 (32gb), all sd cards that I have been swapping in and outa my Pi4-4gb that I would like to consolidate on a just arrived 1 TB usb-ssd.

I would like to install PINN on the ssd and migrate the sd cards to it and understand that these 'custom' os installs likely need to be tar-balled before they can be installed into PINN.

My question is would it be possible to 'clone' the individual sd's, (offline of course in a usb reader) into the PINN installed ssd drive as another option for this situation?

It should be possible with PINN. Although you have a couple of limitations to workaround.
I suggest installing PINN on your SSD, and get it to install fresh copies of each of your OSes from the internet. This will ensure all the correct files and scripts are present. I'm in the process of adding Twister from another contributor, so it's not currently available in PINN. Instead you can just install Raspbian in its place initially.
By default, PINN will allocate the whole of the SSD to these OSes, which might be quite significant on a 1TB drive. If you don't want to do this you could use Matt's webpage to fix the sizes of each OS (http://pinn.mjh.nz). Maybe add some ProjectSpaces or Data Partition at the end to fill the remaining space and reserve it for future OSes.

Once you have installed the OSes, you need to "clone" your existing OSes onto the appropriate partitions that you have just created.
Do this offline by first mounting the SSD and look in partition 6 "settings" for "installed_os.json which will indicate which OS is in which partition on your SSD. Delete the existing files in each OS partition, then mount your existing SD card in a USB reader and copy the files across to the corresponding partition. Make sure you copy all hidden files etc by using rsync or something and be careful to preserve your existing SD card images by mounting them read-only, for example, to prevent accidents.

Once you have repeated this for all OSes, boot PINN, go to the maintenance/fixup menu option and repair each OS. This should fix up the partition references for you, and then you shouid be good to go.

Disclaimer: I've not tried the above procedure myself, but it should work. It probably needs some dedicated options in PINN to make this simpler. If you have problems with Twister, I'll try and point you to preliminary copies of a PINN version of it to allow it to be installed properly.

[DarrenHill]

Don't forget to test it by installing to a new drive before you rely on it.

Just to confirm, both Raspi OS and Retropie restored fine from the backups, and I now have a clone of the original card as a secondary backup

[bonzer2u]

Hi Ron, PC,

Thank you both for the pointers. In the time since my last post I 'test' tried both 'formal' methods of berryconverter>berryboot and through the PINN method of taring the sd-cards and get them installed on a 128bg USB drive to only fail miserably on both occasions.....DOH

However, I did not try PINN as PC just suggested. I setup a clean 128gb USB drive to boot into PINN with no problem. Then I had formatted another 128gb usb stick (ext4) with the tarball OS/setups to transfer from back to the PINN-drive. PINN saw my 2 new installs from the usb stick but when I checked the box in the gui, no mb were reflected to install, always stayed zero. PINN also saw both target locations with ample available storage for both OS installs??? I tweeked the json files a dozen times but was never able to get an install allocation to ever register with either OS's tar.xz files.

I guess I would like to give try multi-boot a try if I cant get PINN to work. I spent alot of electricity into creating those tar files.....

So my brief understanding is to run the OS's off their current sd-cards and do a hot backups to a USB stick using image-backup. Then restoring both to a different usb drive booted off of your multiboot program?
I have 2 64gb sd cards, one 31gb used of Twister and the other a 52gb used of retropie4. I would like to restore/multiboot both to a faster 128gb USB drive and leave the retropie a couple gig, the rest of available space to twister.

Could you give me a little more detail on how this would look with multiboot ?

I just wanna nail down a clean, solid process with these 2 smaller images before I commit my new 1tb ssd to this project.

thx

[RonR]

Could you give me a little more detail on how this would look with multiboot ?

It's actually very easy but let's move this discussion to the MultiBoot topic so as to not hijack this topic. I'll post a reply there shortly...

[procount]

PINN saw my 2 new installs from the usb stick but when I checked the box in the gui, no mb were reflected to install, always stayed zero.

You probably made some small mistake with the JSON files.
If you want to continue with PINN, you can post an issue on my GitHub where you can post copies of your JSON files for me to check for you.

[kartable]

Hi,

I have been able to (partially) install PINN today with Raspberry Pi OS and LibreELEC + a free space on a 64 Go flash drive.

LibreELEC is OK but Raspberry Pi (the full version) won't start. I get a black screen with a lot of lines ending with "end Kernel panic - not syning: attempted to kill init".

In other situations I would erase the install files and start again from scratch. But it took me 10 hours of download.

Is there a way to check the files and to replace them with an image I already have on my PC, which would take less time to download?

Thanks

JC

[procount]

Did you manage to get RaspiOS Full to load initially at all to set configuration and update it?
We have recently discovered that the initial `apt update` requires 1GB of space to update Wolfram, which is more than the minimum of free disk space we reserve. So that could be an issue. But if you don't even get to that point, I'm not sure what it could be.

If you already have a local image of the full version, and you know how to loop mount it, you could copy the contents of its 2 partitions over your existing installation. After that, run the partition_setup script again on that OS from the fixup/repair menu in PINN to fix up the partition references and then it should boot.

[kartable]

I could not look over the loading completely as it took a very long time. I suppose everything did load as it should be till the point where the message appeared that all is set.

After that, no I could not get to the point of updating RaspiOS. If this requires 1GB in the root partition, I can figure out the problem later.

Now when I insert the flash drive in my PC under windows, I have access to 4 partitions. I am using MiniTool Partition Wizard to see the whole disk and how it is divided:
- Recovery 63 Mo Fat32 (PINN)
- Settings 32 Mo Ext4
- boot 256 Mo Fat32 (RaspiOS)
- root 19.2 Go Ext4
- 2 for LibreELEC
- 2 for future additional installation

I am a bit lost to replace the content of the RaspiOS partition with the files from my image. I usually go for Etcher, but it will erase all...


EDIT: What I did
- I replaced the content of the boot partition with the content of an installation I have on my SD card
- I ran PINN with this new config
> Now I get the 4 raspberries on my screen, which is a good sign, but it stops with the message "No caching mode page found - Assuming drive cache: write through"

If I press reinstall in the PINN menu, just for RaspiOS, it says it will erase all of sda...

[AleXSR700]

Hi everyone,
I only just found this cool app and wanted to install LibreElec alongside my current image. But my current image was installed without PINN in place.
Is there an easy way to
- either make a backup of my current system that I can install via PINN
or
- install PINN with my current system running and then adding the LibreElec?

I read the readme, but I did not understand how I can make an installable image from my running system and I did not find whether or not is is possible to install PINN and a second OS aaafter having installed and setup my original OS.

P.S.: I would like to keep my current OS as I compiled drivers for it, installed all kinds of software and adjusted everything. It would be very "inconvinient" to have to do it all over again... if I could even remember how I did it

Cheers
Alex

[procount]

@AleXSR700 - have a read of this wiki page -> https://github.com/procount/pinn/wiki/H ... using-PINN

You only have 1 OS to backup instead of 2, but the principle is the same. If you don't have a PC with linux on it, you can use a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian on it instead. It will just take a bit longer.

[procount]

@kartable -
If you can copy your OS from another SD card then there is no need to reinstall the OS after doing that. You would just be repeating the installation. So just do one or the other. (When using the reinstall option, only the partitions of the original OS will be erased, not the whole SD card. It is a dialog message error).

As I said above, once you have got a new copy of Raspios installed, you need to go to the maintenance menu, select RasPiOS and run the repair/fix-up script. Only after you have done that can you try to boot it.

[kartable]

When I click "fix (f)" in the maintenance menu, it says "DONE - SUCCESSFULL system check".
But on reboot of RaspiOS I get the 4 raspberries on my screen and it stops with the message "No caching mode page found - Assuming drive cache: write through"

[procount]

Have you also tried copying the root partition from your SD card as well? You will need to fix/repair again after doing this.

[kartable]

I have not been able to copy the root partition from my SD card, so that I decided first I would try to upload RaspiOS again. But it took 6 hours before I stopped the loading that reached 50%. Of course, the mismatch is still there.

Now I am trying to take profit of the possibility to install from the /os folder as explained here: https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/m ... on-sd-card. So that I am starting from scratch... But the PINN menu doesn't offer the option to select the local images instead of the choice offered for installation from the server. I probably missed someting again.

[procount]

The Raspios FULL installation is quite large, but 6-10 hours download seems excessive. You can use PINN's download feature to download an OS from the internet to a USB stick so that it can be used locally, or you can download it manually so lond as you download all the correct files and put them in the correct folder of the USB stick.

PINN gets its list of OSes from various sources: multiple internet repos and multiple local sources. It combines all OSes into one long list. Where there are multiples sources of the same OS, it takes the most recent version. If two versions are the same, it prefers the local version over the internet version. The source of each OS chosen is indicated by the icon at the rights hand side of each description, which will either look like a USB device for local images, or an RJ45 network connection for an internet version.

It is possible to restrict the OS sources by changing PINN's command line, which can be easily done using PINN's Edit Config Options in the maintenance menu. So you can disable the default source, or delete the repo server etc.

[kartable]

There is maybe a problem with the files format, as the Readme says any "other" OS should be formatted with a .tar.xz file for each partition.

But the files as downloaded from the official sites are:
- 2020-08-20-raspios-buster-armhf.zip
- LibreELEC-RPi2.arm-9.2.4.img.gz

Anyway they are not identified by PINN, even if they are the latest versions (no USB icons at the rights hand side).

I have tried to restrict OS sources from the config options by deleting the repo server. No way.

Sorry for the time on this. I want to give it a last chance if possible. Thank you!