Upgrading RPi4 running off hard drive leaves me with a black screen

  • I had been running an older version of LibreElec with the Leia version for a while now. It's actually running off of the USB hard drive, with no SD card at all. The same hard drive contains my KODI library.

    I just followed the instructions to update to the latest version of LibreElec and Kodi. I downloaded the file LibreELEC-RPi4.arm-9.95.2.img.gz and copied it (using ssh) to the /storage/.update folder. When I rebooted, it looked like it went thru the upgrade successfully, and then rebooted itself again at the end. I saw the rainbow color box, but that 's it. Nothing else but a a completely black screen (and my monitor eventually goes into power save because of no signal).

    I did notice that the screen said that it found an "incompatible config.txt file" that it copied to config.txt.old. When I look at the files (thru the ssh connection that still works), I see that it changed the gpu_mem from my old value of 320 back to 76. I don't see any other changes in that file.

    Known issue with latest Matrix build of Kodi? Any recommendations on how to recover this? Thanks much!!!

    Oh - and after a couple more reboots, even ssh no longer connects! :(

    • Best Answer
    • Official Post

    I just followed the instructions to update to the latest version of LibreElec and Kodi.

    LibreELEC (Matrix) 10.0 BETA2 – LibreELEC

    LibreELEC (Matrix) 10.0 BETA1 – LibreELEC

    ^ well, the instructions clearly state *** DO NOT UPGRADE! *** so by ignoring them and upgrading you broke your install :)

    I'd suggest you (re)start with a clean install on SD card, then migrate files to the USB drive once working.

  • I'm back up and running. I was able to install a "fresh" copy of LibreElec on my USB thumbdrive that my RPi4 boots from, and all is good. :) Kind of a pain having to reconfigure everything again. I need to research a way to backup my key KODI settings so I can quickly restore them after I rebuild. I have used a Kodi backup/restore add-in, but it backs up WAY too much and takes so long.