Posts by fabric8

Ok, I finally got it to boot. Since I don't have a linux system, I installed Oracle Virtual Box on my Win10 PC to get a linux VM running. Once I had a linux VM up (Ubuntu 5.10 ), I connected my USB stick then did the below. Keep in mind, my linux VM identified/assigned my USB stick as /dev/sda. YMMV

1. used fdisk to partition it: fdisk /dev/sda then when prompted, pressed "n" for new partition and followed the rest of the prompts

2. then I formatted it: mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1

3. then labeled it: tune2fs -L LIBREELEC_DISK /dev/sda1

I then disconnected the USB stick from PC, connected it to the MX2, powered up and BINGO! Kodi was up!!! Not sure why the image maker LibreELEC.USB-SD.Creator.Win32 didn't work well for me.

Also, my 1st attempt at this was with a 16Gb metal thumbdrive. For whatever reason, it would run VERY hot and it slowed Kodi down a lot, freezing here and there but usually recovering but there were a few times it hard froze. So I switched to another 16Gb thumbdrive I had (generic plastic casing). That ran without freezing, but response times were slow clicking around Kodi, waiting for pages to display.

Finally I took my 16Gb class10 SD card from my GoPro, did the above to it, booted up and was amazed how FAST Kodi now runs. I later compared the write speed on all 3. The class10SD has a write speed of almost 30Mb/s whereas the USB sticks were 8 & 10Mb/s.

So long story short, if your NAND is bad and you have to run Kodi on external memory, make sure it's fast to get the best performance out of it.

I'm really loving this 8.0.1 build. Thanks to all!!!

p.s. I can't believe my original xBox (17yrs old!!!!), xbox360, Apple TV2 (jailbroken with Kodi 14.2) are all still running perfectly with no NAND issues. Such a shame Matricom used such cheap memory on the MX2. Granted the xbox and 360 both have mechanical HD's. But my ATV2 is way older than the MX2.

Quote from tierry

Somehow I remembered the toothpick method and got things to work and thanks Fabric8 for clarity on step number in SD/USB creator. No need to choose, plus in the very first post it said it would use the WeTeck Play version. Oh well. So now that Kodi 17.1 is working splendidly, I just saw there was a bug on SPMC on my other Android box. Hopefully, this is only for the SPMC version as it still uses 16.5.5, I think? Anyway, hooray, it works!! And thanks. I didn't think that old box could run 17 version of Kodi. It does!!

Tierry, I'm glad my post helped you out. Hoping you can help me get mine working. Did you do any step differently than how I did mine?

Sorry in advance for the long noob post, but I'm hoping to get some help installing this and hoping this helps others too.

My MX2 had been running OpenELEC-Amlogic.MX2.arm-5.0.3 for the longest time perfectly until yesterday when it failed to boot with corruption errors. I tried a clean install but still kept getting errors. I then did an upgrade to 6.0.3 which was able to boot all the way up. But after a few reboots for testing, I got the same corruption messages again so I know my NAND is shot. That had led me here.

I want to do a clean install of 8.0.1, so I'm following this:

"New installations from recovery:
You will need an ext3 formated SD card or USB drive with LIBREELEC_DISK label for the first boot. Then you can change the label of internal NAND storage partition as described above if you want to use it instead of the external storage. The rest of the installation process is the same as usual"

I made the ext3 USB stick image following this process:

1. Insert USB stick into PC

2. start LibreELEC.USB-SD.Creator.Win32

3. click "Select File", browse to storage.img.gz

4. click "Write"

It writes and finishes successfully. I don't believe the settings for #1 (select version) are relevant because as soon as I click "Select File" and point to storage.img.gz, those values in #1 dissapear.

Then I follow this process:

If you want to do a clean install:

1. flash the ZIP from recovery as usual (using FAT32 formated SD card or USB drive)

2. power off the box (don't worry about the error during first boot)

3. insert empty SD card or USB drive with ext3 filesystem and the LIBREELEC_DISK label and power on the box (the system will use it for storage instead of the internal NAND)

When I power on the MX2 with the USB stick, this is what I get:

***Error in mount_storage: mount_common: Could not mount LABEL=LIBREELEC_DISK ****

### Starting debugging shell... type exit to quit ###

sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

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