I may have made a mistake by upgrading from a shell command line rather than the GUI but I got into a loop with the sad smiley face. I then stopped mediacenter and moved the contents of the .kodi directory as instructed but to no avail. In fact, a new .kodi directory has not been created.
Before I do a completely new install, I thought I’d see if someone has a suggestion for a surgical fix.
I can ssh in and did so several times previously to implement various recovery suggestions including moving the .kodi folder, all to no avail. Somehow I missed the message about the read-only file system
If anyone else runs into this, It’s a bit of a trick to fix.
You need to fix/fsck the boot partition (as explained in my post about update failures from months ago), force the previous install to complete (running the apt-get dist-upgrade will throw errors to tell you what to do.), then run the dist-upgrade again to make sure everything was done, then sudo reboot.
Don’t yank the power cord to reboot, at any point of fixing the system, or the partition will be read-only again.
Since you can’t access the Kodi menu, you need to use sudo reboot
There’s a thread from a couple days ago where I helped someone step by step through the diagnosis and fix.