Request a good manual LibreELEC as primary system.

1st Official Post

    Good morning,

    my name is Richard from the Netherlands and i have a request.

    I have an old PC with HDMI output wich i want to be able to use as a htpc.
    THe thing is that i want it to be as liight as possible so the mediacenter software can use all resources.


    I am searching for a good manual on how i can make LibreELEC the primary OS that my PC can boot from.

    The perfect thing would be to have it dualboot with windows 7.

    Offcourse i have searched google for a good manual but they are all about OPENELEC and it seems there is no easy way to do it.

    Is there anyone who could help me out?

    • Official Post

    The installation progress is nearly the same as for OpenELEC. As we are on an early state, and the wiki is WIP, there are no manuals atm.

    To know if your hardware is generally supported, just get us a ffew details about the specs of that machine (GPU is most important).

    For a single boot system (if the hardware is supported):

    - download the img.gz file from here: Index of /builds/testing/Generic/
    - extract the gz file
    - write the .img to an USB-stick
    - plug the USB stick to your PC and boot from it
    - install it on your HDD
    - done

    As I never did a dual boot myself, I can't help much for that.

    Greetings

    Hi David,

    thanks for this really quick reply.

    i have the following hardware.

    64 bit Amd e1 1200 processer
    amd HD 7310 raedon card.

    My worry is that LibreELEC does not recognize the HDMI port for sound and vision (not bowie).
    In WIndows 7 it costed me a day to find the right driver to make the HDMI sound work ;)

    Is there somwhere i can see if my hardware is supported?

    Really like this project btw

    Edited once, last by chewitt (March 23, 2016 at 3:17 PM).

    As of now this will work only if both OS can be installed in Bios/Legacy mode not EFI/UEFI so adjust accordingly your settings in Bios/UEFI.
    To Dual boot with Windows it will be easier if you install LibreELEC first.


    You need:
    - Empty hard drive or be prepared to wipe your drive
    - USB stick with LibreELEC installation files (use the “LibreELEC USB-SD Creator” to download and install the files to the USB stick)
    - Copy of your favorite bootable live Linux distribution with GParted (i use Ubuntu LTS 32bits version,loaded with GParted already)
    - Windows installation media
    - A copy of EasyBCD 2.3

    Then follow this sequence:
    - Install LibreELEC from the USB stick (This will wipe your drive!!)
    - Restart the computer with your live Linux system and start GParted
    - You will see 2 ext4 partitions: System (~512MB) and Storage (rest of your drive's capacity)(if the partition names are different it's ok it will still work)
    - Reduce the size of the Storage partition to your preferred value (min. 4GB)(i set it to 10GB)
    - Create a NTFS partition with the rest of the space available for Windows(at this point you should have 3 partitions on your drive,2 ext4 and 1 NTFS)
    - Flag Windows partition as BOOT
    - Shut down the computer and remove the live Linux media
    - Restart the computer with the Windows installation media and install Windows(if you used GParted correctly you will see the NTFS partition to install Windows)
    - Restart the computer, it will boot into Windows, don't worry that there is no sign of LibreELEC at this point.
    - Install EasyBCD and start the program.
    - Create a new boot entry, select the Linux tab and select Syslinux as bootloader, your LibreELEC boot path will be displayed.
    - Adjust all settings (names, default boot, timeout etc.) and save everything.
    - Restart your computer, at this point if you configured the Windows boot manager properly via EasyBCD you should have the option to boot Windows or LibreELEC.

    Edited once, last by vitorp07 (February 22, 2017 at 4:41 PM).