LibreELEC keeps crashing immediately on boot, can't figure out what is wrong.

  • So my system (LibreELEC on a desktop PC) booted into safe mode this evening. I thought it must have been a mistake, so hit reboot and now I am stuck in a boot loop. I get the LibreELEC logo and then the whole system crashes and I get the computer BIOS again. there isn't enough time to retrieve logs or try disabling add-ons.

    Is there any way of forcing safe mode again?

  • Create a bootable USB from another machine; either the LE installer (at the syslinux menu type 'run' and it will boot LE from USB instead of running the installer) .. or an Ubuntu LiveUSB image or similar that gives you a console or desktop to work from. You need to mount the /storage (second) partition from the internal drive and move /storage/.kodi to /storage/.kodi-old and then reboot. On boot you will end up with a clean/default Kodi config. You can then manually restore (move) files from the previous configuration over until you either end up with a working configuration again, or you discover which bit causes everything to break. NB: Safe mode is doing the same thing; moving a bad Kodi config out of the way and giving you a clean config to experiment from. If that isn't working or you end up in the same situation again, I'd suspect an underlying hardware problem, e.g. failing disk. LE is packaged with the entire OS in two files (KERNEL and SYSTEM) that uncompress on boot to create a virtual filesystem (only /storage is real). It's great for simplicity, but one bit wrong and one of the files is invalid, won't decompress, and the OS won't boot. Conventional distros that scatter 10k files over the disk are more resilient because a disk error only breaks 1:10000 files, not 1:2.

  • Ok, I seem to have fixed it, it is now booting up properly, but the background it staying red as if it is safe mode.

    Thank you for your help it got me started!

    **EDIT** figured that out, it was just a setting in the theme! Thank you.