How to backup/restore after an update made OSMC not boot?

General Discussion
1

A recent update trashed my OSMC install, it seems. At first I thought it was only Kodi that broke, so moved the /home/osmc/.kodi directory assuming that this should allow the OS to boot fine. I still see a “sadface” image after boot and can’t even simply get to a tty console for whatever reason.

Before I mark my OSMC+Kodi experiment as failed, I wanted to reinstall and restore at least my Kodi setup, but I have no cleat idea what to restore and where. Is there any recent and working howto for this?

2
3

My OSMC doesn’t boot as I said, so clearly there is nothing much to “stop”. :slight_smile:

Secondly, are the custom local repositories I installed also all in the .kodi directory? What id I wipe my sd card, reinstall osmc, put back the .kodi into the new install and Kodi it will still sadface – i.e. can it be a corrupted Kodi installation that’s causing this?

Also, how on earth do I just get a tty after the OS has booted?

4

If you see the sad face continually looping, Kodi is continually trying to start and will continue to do so until the command is issued.

Yes

Yes

SSH

5

Providing logs may give us a clue as to what may be choking Kodi on boot.

6

If you see the sad face continually looping, Kodi is continually trying to start and will continue to do so until the command is issued.

Actually, after I removed the .kodi from /home/osmc, the OS boots to a blank screen.

I’m quite familiar with SSH, but the machines does not come up since the updates. Perhaps the OS doesn’t seem to bring up wifi and I cound’t be bothered to connect ethernet.

7

That’s possible. Maybe your sdcard had failed resulting in larger portions of the system to become corrupt, not just Kodi?

8

Providing logs may give us a clue as to what may be choking Kodi on boot.

Which logs? Is the OS using systemd? Where are the logs cause I can’t find /var/log/journal ?

9

Yes. From CLI, grab-logs -A is what we would like to see.

10

I don’t know what grab-logs is; as I said the OS is not functional, I have the image on my machine, but can’t run custom commands, need standard tools to access hopefully standard OS logs :confused:

11

Kodi logs are found ~/.kodi/temp/.
Use paste.osmc.io to provide kodi.log and kodi.old.log.

12

kodi.log: http://paste.osmc.io/ubivenebey.coffee
kodi.old.log: http://paste.osmc.io/umolipuqis.coffee

It seems like these files are still dated from 1.5 months ago despite the fact that I’ve tried to boot the rpi with osmc a few times since.

Also those logs contain nothing useful, so I’d need to dig into the actual OS logs. Where are those?

13

What is the binary format of the /var/log/faillog, /var/log/lastlog and the rest? There seems to be no stadard systemd logs either.

14

While I’ve since decided to switch to libreelec, but I’m curious if anyone is willing to shed some light onto how is one supposed to read logs off of an OS image – or verify the integrity of an installed OS image for that matter.

15

both log files provided show at last:

xx:xx:xx:.xxx T:1917767680   ERROR: Failed to load skin 'skin.osmc'
xx:xx:xx:.xxx T:1917767680   FATAL: Default skin 'skin.osmc' could not be loaded! Terminating..

So, this means this was a sad-face loop starting the mediacenter, unknown root cause, the OSMC skin could not be loaded.

The OS that time was most possible operating and you could have had access via SSH to the box.
I’m sure one could have helped you if you would have provided the data that time. Unclear what exactly happened afterwards.

16

The OS that time was most possible operating and you could have had access via SSH to the box.

Fwiw No, it was not. It did not responded over ssh.