I have a 320GB USB HDD which I’d like to get Kodi up and running on, with my RPi2. My primary reason for this is I’d like to stream a lot of media from FTP, but I don’t want to shorten the lifespan of my SD cards. I thought it would be as easy as formatting the drive as FAT32 and using the OSMC installer, but the HDD doesn’t show up on the installer.
How do I install OSMC on the USB HDD? If that’s not practical or advised, for whatever reason, is there an alternative like ensuring the cache only writes to my HDD?
Not sure what you mean there. You don’t install to the hard drive with a USB install, you install the image to the SD card as normal, choosing USB install, then you make sure you connect the hard drive to your Pi before booting the SD card the first time - the USB hard drive will then be formatted and installed onto automatically.
An SD card is always required to boot a Pi, on a USB install only the /boot partition is on the SD card, the rest is on the USB drive instead of everything (both partitions) being on the SD card.
Well, I feel a bit a stupid now. I followed a misleading guide and assumed that the hard drive would show in the installer. However, as you say, you just pick usb and then it installs to the hard drive when you first boot it. Thank you!