unable to connect to SSH

long story short. My ever reliable version of libreelec using Kodi 16.1 or there abouts crashed. it spends 99% of its life getting unused sitting in the shed connected to the tv. I mainly use it for HDHR addon for TV and I have it setup to use the gpio pins via ssh to open the shed roller doors. and then every once in a blue moon Ihave a tv show or movie playing. via smb share.

I reformatted my RPi B+ with the latest version available for RPi 1 version LibreELEC-RPi.arm-9.2.6.img.gz
I have SSH enabled in the cmdline.txt file (see below). and set it to run from a usb so if it crashed again i wouldn't lose my SD card data.
I also ensured SSH was enabled when the new start up wizard opened but I cant seem to access SSH.
I done an open port scan that showed port 22 was not open... Firewall is turned off , ssh password is enabled and correct

is there something im missing?

boot=/dev/mmcblk0p1 disk=/dev/sda1 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 ssh

I found that if I tried to run the disk partition from my usb stick is when it would not work. Yet I still had the sd card as the boot.

I'm not sure what the problem is but I decided to just run it from the sd card than deal with it any longer.

It works fine from the sd card.