OSMC froze and will not boot

Dear All,

I’ve only been using RB and OSMC for 2 weeks so are quite a newbie.
OSMC froze while playing a film today and nothing would make it work, I ended up switching power off.

Straight after Pi would not boot, no text or video through hdmi, no ssh, red light on, green light blinking 4 times.
I read on other posts that config.txt contents may give a clue, put my sd card in a mac and can access it, but the file has no contents.

I assume that some files got corrupted due freeze / hard power off. Is there any way to repair the files / card, so I do not need to wipe it and re-install the system from scratch?

All suggestions and help much appreciated.

Thanks

A bit more info, perhaps I’m an idiot, but I have been looking into config.txt and found it blank.

There are two more config files:

config-4.4.8-3-osmc
config-4.4.6-3-osmc

I assume due to system update and the current one is 4.4.8-3.
Would it help to copy some of the content? There’s a lot of it though.

Ok, first thing first. If that happens in the future first try to access OSMC via SSH. If you still can connect via SSH just execute sudo systemctl restart mediacenter

It is quite unlikely that a hard power off corrupts all files especially the ones on /boot. My guess is more your SD Card failed and that led to the freeze.

As I wrote a blank config.txt is quite strange and would unlikely be coming from a single power down.
config-4.4.8-3-osmc is not related to config.txt that actually is just an informative copy of the config of the respective kernel.

To be honest I guess the easiest is you just do a clean reinstall. If there is any important data on the SD Card you need to save you would need to get access to the ext4 partition on it. The easiest way would be to boot a Linux Live USB.

#fzinken,

thanks for reply. Clean install is not a problem, probably about 1h, now that I have half a clue what I’m doing, and all data is kept on a separate drive anyway.

It would be good however to have a restore / repair solution, in case it keeps happening. The card is class 10 SanDisk so it is a bit frustrating it should fail

Could you elaborate on Linux live USB, please?

It’s all new to me, last time I used prompt was in 1995 setting up web pages in unix, but it is all good fun to learn new things again

Well as you need to access the etx4 partition of the SD Card which doesn’t work with MAC build in tool my suggestion is to just temporarily boot a Live Linux either directly or in a virtual machine. And the starting point for that is a Live Linux on a USB stick. Just google Linux Live USB.

Thanks for advise, I’ll look into linux usb. It seems, however, I can clone Pi sd card on mac if using terminal commands

Anyway, I razed the card and re-installed osmc within 15 minutes, now just need to install and setup Couchpotato and Sickrage