Continuing the discussion from An improved look and feel for OSMC :
This is now the third time that I have had to reinstall release candidate 3. Each time I get an update the osmc crashes on a reboot leaving me looking at a flashing unhappy face. I note that the load text is appearing over the front of the OSMC screen in white text on a black background then goes to the unhappy face. Why do these updates keep crashing the system?
Once I do a reinstall everything works just fine - but the updates should not require me to have to start from scratch each time.
There’s nothing wrong with the update system that would cause what you describe - it works extremely reliably (on hundreds of thousands of devices) and a lot of care and attention has gone into its design and testing.
Almost certainly you have a hardware issue such as one of the following:
Faulty SD card
Inadequate power supply
Too much overclock (try reducing your overclock to default)
(This is not an exhaustive list)
There is a small chance that some additional 3rd party software you’ve installed may cause an issue during upgrades but it’s uncommon.
Anything that causes a crash or file system corruption when writing to disk is going to cause you problems when you upgrade because you are overwriting lots of critical system files during the upgrade process - so any subtle hardware issues you have that might not cause apparent problems during normal operation will tend to show themselves at upgrade time because so many boot critical files are written to disk during an upgrade.
If you see any text being displayed over the OSMC splash image during boot it means an error has occurred during boot, typically a service failing to load - if you could get a photo of this error it would be helpful, although I suspect that the root cause of your problems is going to be disk corruption.
I had the same problem after this update. This is the only time I’ve had to reload after an update and I just got everything setup the way I wanted it. Tried to get help on the forum, no answer. Tried to get help in the chat room, no answer. Very frustrated!
Backups are your friend. Kodi very kindly puts all your custom stuff in a single folder, making it easy to secure.
Also, logs or it didnt happen.
Seriously. “It crashes!” is about as helpful as “it looked at me funny!” when it comes to software.
I think I may have found the problem. I had Confluence Mod installed and enabled when I performed the update. Fortunately I had enabled SSH so I was able to manually backup and restore my settings (except skin customizations) to a fresh install. After the first boot, I got a warning that it was not compatible with Confluence Mod so I disabled it.
Hope this was it and helps someone else before installing this update.