Extracting Disc Image from Compressed File

[brownjc87]

Hello there everyone,

I’m sorry if this appears to be a hilariously basic question, but it seems so ridiculous that I haven’t seen anyone actually address it on the forums, faqs, or WIKI page.

I’m completely new to this entire Retropi project (and anything pertaining to a raspberry pi at all). My brother gifted me a Raspberry Pi 2 for my birthday, and I’ve been trying to transform it into a Retropi over the past 48 hours. No such luck.

I’ve gone through all of the walkthroughs and guides, and I’ve followed all of them to a T, step by step, and could not get the Pi to boot up after I wrote the disc image to the microSD card. So I started to watch videos of people doing this, to make sure I was reading the instructions correctly.

My work flow is as follows:

1) Insert 8gb MicroSD card into card reader on PC.
2) Using SD formatter, I format the card to wipe it clean.
3) I downloaded the compressed Retropi 3.1 disc image from the download page of this website. It’s a compressed “.gz” file when I finally have it downloaded.
4) I need to unpack this file, so I extract the files contained within the “.gz” file using 7-zip.
5) Now, the file is a “.img” file

<HERE IS WHERE I THINK THINGS ARE WRONG, BUT I’LL GET BACK TO THAT AFTER I EXPLAIN>

6) Using Win32 Disc imager, I write this “.img” file to the formatted SD card.
7) Safely eject SD card
8) place SD card into the slot of the Raspberry Pi 2.
9) connect power supply.

End result is that the raspberry Pi does not appear to start up. Two lights are on, one green, and one red, and neither of them are flashing.

Now. When I mentioned that “this is where I think things went wrong?” After watching all kinds of videos, whenever the guy extracts the disc image from the file he downloaded from this site, the disc image has an icon of a disc, with the filename “whateveritis.img”

When I extact the image file, the image file STILL looks like a winzip icon, and does not have the .”img” in its name. I only know it’s an image file because the properties of the file say that it is.

So I’m frustrated. I can’t even get the retroPi to boot, for what seems to be a complete non-issue for everyone else out there.

If it helps, my setup is as follows:

Raspberry Pi 2, Model B, 1GB
Kingston 8gb MicroSD card

There is an HP USB Keyboard, a Mouse, and a USB SNES controller plugged into the Pi when I attempt to turn it on.

I should also mention that, to make sure my Pi wasn’t broken, I formatted a card and installed the proprietary Raspberry NOOB software to it. After placing the SD card in the Pi, the Pi booted up no problem and proceeded to install Raspbian.

This issue only happens when I format the card and then install the Retropi disc image.

So. Thoughts? Anyone? This issue seems so basic that it isn’t even included in any troubleshooting guides; it’s implied that when you extract the disc image from the file you download here on the website, that the disc image will be extracted correctly and will work.

Sorry if I’ve bugged you, or if there really is a place where I could have consulted to find the solution to this problem. I just can’t seem to find it.

[Floob]

Thats probably ok – are you 100% sure you have a Pi2?

There is a chance the download is corrupted – you could try the torrent download option instead?

[brownjc87]

…looks like the download links on this website are corrupt. I’ll have to find somewhere else to get my hands on the disc image file.

[Anonymous]

You can use the torrent links on the download page if you have a torrent client available to download it with. Also, in the future I would suggest always checking your download against the available checksum to be sure that you have the whole thing.

Another thing that could be an issue would be with the PC’s HDD or RAM, causing the file to become corrupted upon extraction.

[Author]

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