The Crystal HD card would have nothing to do with this. It simply decodes H264 video playback.
OSMC will boot and work ok without it, just don’t expect HD video playback of H264 files to be great.
A black screen on bootup usually means that someone may have to manually configure X11 since the settings their display requires, for some reason wasn’t auto detected. I had the issue back with CB2, with my HDMI TV. If the TV was connected downstream of my surround sound system I would get a black screen. Even when directly connected, the TV would send out invalid EDID info and X11 would therefore select the wrong settings and X11 was running in Standard Def.
Sad face can be cause by many things. For example, a “read only” partition, caused by partition corruption will cause kodi startup to fail. Partition corruption can occur if you unplug the USB stick without shutting down OSMC.
We don’t suggest anyone try an HDD install until the bug is fixed. There could be other issues indirectly caused by the bug and you will need to wipe and reinstall the HDD once the bug is fixed anyhow.
This was explained back in post #4 of this thread.