Boot freeze with external HD on latest update

Help and Support
1

After the latest update my Pi3 system, which has been working for over a year with no problems, fails to boot, freezing on the blue OSMC logo screen. I have isolated the problem- it only occurs when my external 2TB USB drive is connected. I have reverted to my old setup, done fresh installs, and installed alternative Kodi distributions. This freeze-on-boot condition only happens on OSMC with the latest update applied. The system boots normally without the external drive connected.

The drive has been error checked and is fine. I am mightily struggling to get any logs as the system won’t boot to a useful state with the drive connected, and without, it boots fine and the logs are clean.

I’m hoping someone else has seen this problem and might save me more troubleshooting time. Any thoughts?

2

Are you mounting it via fstab or automount?
Have you tried alternative power supply?

3

I was just about to add something to my post- that’s the other weird thing. If I boot the system, then connect the drive, it’s apparently not detected, and what’s weirder, various things stop working, including various menu items (when selected, nothing happens) and what’s worse, ssh stops working so I can’t investigate what’s going on.

As far as power supply, I have a 4A supply set at 5.1 volts, the voltage is rock solid and as I said, this same setup works perfectly with the latest kodi (and even all my previous plugins and settings) under one of the other Kodi distros (*elec).

4

Oh, and misread your question somehow- I’m using automount, never had an issue before.

5

Well that definetly sound like something is wrong, suggest:
grab-logs -A before you connect the drive
Connect a keyboard (as SSH fails) and upload grab-logs -A after connecting it

6

I’ll give it a shot- the trick is going to be to get it to drop to a command prompt somehow.

The thing is, the only thing that has changed about the setup is the last update, so I was hoping someone a little more familiar with OSMC might know of something that changed in this update that could be related. It’s not the latest Kodi as that works with OSes.

7

Shows Exit and press ESC when you see black screen

Nothing has changed in regards to the disk mounting in the last version.
Only change is the new kernel which should not impact it unless the filesystem you use causes issues

8

Hehe, I wasn’t going to trouble you for those instructions, but thanks for that. I did google it and find my way to the prompt.

So, the good news is that the drive isn’t crashing the system or anything. It even automounts and I can get into the drive and access all the contents, etc. The one thing is that dmesg gives a bunch of weird feedback, such as “tag#0 UNKNOWN(0x2003) Result: hostbyte…”

I’m not sure these are actually errors, but I’ve never seen them before. Like I said, the drive does mount successfully and I can use the files from the prompt.

Ah, you mentioned filesystem, it is NTFS… wonder if this new kernel is doing something different with the NTFS driver?

9

So but at the same time your SSH is lost?
Suggest to provide logs so we might spot something.
I am not using NTFS but I doubt that would be the problem.

10

geez, I’m punchy this morning. I didn’t read the whole way back through the dmesg…

As it’s mounting the drive, I get a “The driver for the USB controller dwc_otg_hcd does not support scatter-gather which is required by the UAS driver. Please try an other USB controller if you wish to use UAS.” Related possibly?

11

No, something weird is going on… I’m going to have to have a cup of coffee and get these log files over to a place where I can post them.

Thanks for your help, you got me motivated to learn a bit more :wink: Back with more soon,

Cheers!

12

No, UAS driver seems already disabled since 2015

13

side note, is there a way to disable the spash screen temporarily so I can just see where the thing is hanging?

14

@sam_nazarko
See: dwc_otg doesn't support scatter-gather transfers · Issue #875 · raspberrypi/linux · GitHub

CONFIG_USB_UAS should be removed from kernel config.

15

Thanks @popcornmix.

This change has now been made and will be included in the next update.

In a few hours, this will be compiled by Jenkins and available for testing.

I’d appreciate it if you could test this and provide feedback before we release this as an update to other users. To test this update:

  1. Login via the command line
  2. Edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list
  3. Add the following line: deb http://apt.osmc.tv jessie-devel main
  4. Run the following commands to update: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && reboot
  5. Your system should have have received the update.

Please see if the issue is resolved.

I also recommend you edit /etc/apt/sources.list again and remove the line that you added after updating. This will return you to the normal update channel.

Sam

16

Thanks to you guys for looking in to this issue. I just applied the update and unfortunately, it makes no difference in my case- the system still hangs during boot with the external drive connected. I’m supposed to be working now so I won’t be able to test further until later on. I do appreciate the help though!

17

Are you still getting the message: “The driver for the USB controller dwc_otg_hcd does not support scatter-gather which is required by the UAS driver. Please try an other USB controller if you wish to use UAS.”

Updated logs and output of “lsusb -v” would be useful.

18

Also worth posting the output of uname -a so we can verify that you’re on the new kernel. It should be 4.9.29-6 for your Pi3.

19

yep, definitely updated…

Linux julia 4.9.29-6-osmc #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Jun 11 23:08:26 UTC 2017 armv7l GNU/Linux

20

Okay, thanks for checking. When you are able, please try @popcornmix’s suggestions.