Migrating from 6.1.1 to 7.1.1 on Rpi3

[jose1711]

Hello,

I know that migration from 6.1.1 to 7.x is not officially supported, yet I did not want to reinstall + reconfigure other systems on my SD card (NOOBS - shared with Raspbian and OSMC) hence this is how I did it. Only for advanced users. Warning: make sure you know what the commands are doing, partition device names are only listed as examples - you need to adapt them based on what you see on your system.

Maybe someone finds this useful and/or will improve it further.

1. Turn off Raspi, remove SD card and put it into a reader on your (Linux) PC
2. Unmount all automatically mounted partitions
3. Make a backup of the card using dd (just in case)
   sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblkXYZ of=~/backup_raspi_sdcard.iso bs=1M
4. Run gparted, identify the current partitions used by Recalbox (6.1.1)
5. Delete them (could be that you want to copy SHARE partition contents somewhere but as I am using SHARE on external drive, I skipped this step)
6. Recreate partitions in now-free space. Important: the partition name index sequence must be continuous (e. g. mmclbk0p10, p11, p12) and the order must match exactly: first RECALBOX (containing kernel, boot files and squash image), then SHARE (roms, games) and then OVERLAY. I used the following layout:

  1G label: RECALBOX fstype: vfat (fat32)
1.4G label: SHARE fstype: exfat
257M label: OVERLAY fstype: ext4

7. Format filesystems, use labels
8. Get recalbox for NOOBS, mount into /mnt

wget https://upgrade.recalbox.com/latest/noobs/rpi3/recalbox-rpi3.img.xz
xz -d recalbox-rpi3.img.xz
sudo mount -o loop,offset=$((512*2048)) recalbox-rpi3.img /mnt

9. Save recalbox data to first created partition

mkdir /tmp/RECALBOX
mount /dev/RECALBOX_PARTITION_NAME /tmp/RECALBOX
rsync -av /mnt/ /tmp/RECALBOX

10. Mount NOOBS SETTINGS partition and edit installed_os.json making sure recalbox partitions are properly pointing to your newly created partitions.
11. Umount everything, replace SD card from reader and put it back to Raspi
12. Boot up Raspi, select Recalbox in Noobs menu and wait
13. After some minutes (once SHARE partition is populated) Recalbox 7.1.x should start
14. Optionally copy (selectively) data back to SHARE partition from your backup.