LibreElec - Error in mount_sysroot: mount_common: Could not mount /flash/SYSTEM

ctrl_alt_delete · February 1, 2023 at 7:13 PM

My LibreElec has been working fine but suddenly has the error. with:

Starting debugging shell for boot step: prepare_sysroot.... type exit to quit.

If I type exit I get other errors, attached

How is best way to recover from this.

**chewitt** · February 2, 2023 at 10:49 AM

If the system was installed/working and then stopped; the most likely cause is the USB stick (or whatever device you boot from) has failed. LE is packaged with the entire OS contained in two compressed files (KERNEL and SYSTEM). In a conventional distro, if you have bad sectors on disk it will impact only the couple of files that are written to those sectors, and often the impacted files are not critical files so everything will appear to work until the whole disk gives up. Due to the way LE is packaged, if media corruption impacts any sector involved in storing either of KERNEL/SYSTEM the OS cannot boot at all.

If corruption was due to something like unexpected file loss you might be able to boot Ubuntu and scan/fix the filesystem. If it was due to bad media (underlying pyhsical disk or flash memory issues) then you bin everything and start over with a new USB etc. - You might be able to get the contents or important things from /storage as that's a separate partition on the disk.