Migration attempt ends in hard reset and factory default config

frankvw · April 8, 2017 at 2:22 PM

Hi, all,

As per the instructions in the wiki, where it says that:

Quote

There is a possibility however, that migration from OpenELEC to LibreELEC will not work because of a smaller sized system partition in OpenELEC. In that case, make a backup of your OpenELEC setup using the internal Backup option. Then install a fresh copy of LibreELEC onto your (new) SD card and restore the previously made backup afterwards.

The system partition on my OE6 install is only 113MB. So I did the above: made a backup of my OE6 install, took a new SD card, copied a fresh LE8 image on it, booted it, restored the backup. The system went through two reboots and then I was left with the factory default config, again a request for system name, network settings and the like, and no databases. It looks like the second reboot was a hard reset. However no error messages were displayed, and there's no logfile to tell me what went wrong, either.

What troubleshooting options could try to find out why and how this is going wrong?

// FvW

**chewitt** · April 8, 2017 at 3:57 PM Official Post

No idea what the issue is, but the backup is just a .tar archive containing some folders. Copy this to /storage and uncompress the archive, then stop Kodi (systemctl stop kodi.service) and move the directories you care about (.cache, .config and .kodi) back to the right places, then restart kodi.service.

gwilly7 · April 8, 2017 at 7:14 PM

I came accross a similar problem when updating a friends firetv and it was caused by having repositories installed that were no longer valid not allowing the migration process to complete successfully. I saw a thread on the kodi forum I think saying to delete the addons27.db and then the process will complete. Not sure if this might be your issue or not.

frankvw · April 9, 2017 at 12:41 PM

Quote from chewitt

No idea what the issue is, but the backup is just a .tar archive containing some folders. Copy this to /storage and uncompress the archive, then stop Kodi (systemctl stop kodi.service) and move the directories you care about (.cache, .config and .kodi) back to the right places, then restart kodi.service.

Thanks for the suggestion! I did the above, and upon restarting the kodi.service I did get Kodi to run. There was a message stating that Xonfluence had been disabled as an incompatible add-on, which is not what I wanted to see but at least did make sense. Even better, all my libraries and most of the settings were there as well. Progress! (Some interface settings had reverted to their defaults, but that's easily explained from the fact that Xonfluence was not available and Kodi had reverted to its default skin.

[Edit: since then I've seen several instructions on installing Xonfluence on Kodi 17, so it may be that the version of Xonfluence I've got installed on my old OE has been updated since to support Krypton. Will look into that.]

However, when i tried to install the Confluence skin, nothing happened when I selected 'Settings > Interface > Skin > GET MORE...' -- the GET MORE button is simply inoperative. Before restoring my backup I did install Confluence on the out-of-the-box image and that went flawless. Now it didn't. (I only now saw someone running into the same problem, the solution for which in that case was apparently to refresh or reinstall the add-on repository. Going to try that as soon as I manage to deal with what happened next!

What happened next was that I tried a reboot to see if that would do anything. And boy, did it do something. The startup screen appeared, told me not to switch anything off while it was performing a hard reset, completed said hard reset and rebooted, and there I am back again to the out-of-the-box config where I'm being asked for a system name and network settings.

Aargh. What in the name of all that's unholy causes this unwanted hard reset? It has to be something in my backup, because as soon as I restore it on a virgin Libreelec image and reboot, that's what happens.

[Edit: Of course the problem is, once again, that the hard reset nukes everything including the logfiles, so there's nothing to do a post-mortem on. So how do I find out what's triggering this hard reset?]

Suggestions are welcome!

// FvW

**chewitt** · April 10, 2017 at 6:38 AM Official Post

Kodi sometimes fails to retrieve addons.xml from Kodi server(s) which leads to 'get more' etc. not showing anything. If you context click on the repo and "check for updates" manually that forces it to be retrieved and Kodi now has a valid list of whats available.

The hard reset process is triggered by /storage/.cache/reset_oe being present in the filesystem. There is no logging on that process so you're not missing anything useful from the logs being nuked as part of the reset.

The only scenario that I can come up with for this happening is that you've hit "hard reset" and then said "no" when it prompts to reboot (assuming it does prompt, it probably does) and then you've taken a backup of the system. This would lead to reset_oe being present in the backup.

frankvw · April 10, 2017 at 10:43 AM

Quote from chewitt

The hard reset process is triggered by /storage/.cache/reset_oe being present in the filesystem. There is no logging on that process so you're not missing anything useful from the logs being nuked as part of the reset.

The only scenario that I can come up with for this happening is that you've hit "hard reset" and then said "no" when it prompts to reboot (assuming it does prompt, it probably does) and then you've taken a backup of the system. This would lead to reset_oe being present in the backup.

You, sir, rock!

A bit of mystery remains, because I definitely have NOT gone for any hard reset ever (I'm 100% sure of that) yet on my old OE config the file /storage/.cache/reset_oe (5 bytes in size, content 'reset') _is_ present. I have power cycled my OE setup numerous times and never gotten a hard reset. Why? I have no idea. There's also a /storage/.cache/reset_xbmc with the same contents. Anyway, I removed both from the backup tar, installed a clean LE image, restored backup on same, and we're back in business! I followed your instructions on how to reload the repo by manually requesting updates, and that worked as well!

Some small niggles (Error messages like "settings addon is not ready, please try again later" and trying to figure out how to re-activate Xonflence after updating it from its own repo, but those are normal and to be expected after a migration two major versions up. I'll see how get that sorted somehow. [Edit: it took a few tries but I finally managed to get Xonfluence updated, enabled and running. Everything seems to be working 100% now!]

Thanks for curing that headache for me!!