[YellowDog]

for the original flash drive you tested, did you create the OpenELEC install media using the script, or did you run OE's USB creator tool? The latter, under Windows, doesn't re-partition the drive, which can create problems if there's a small hidden partition in front of the larger/bootable/FAT32 one.

I didn't use your script to create a OpenELEC flash drive. I think I used Linux but I might have used Windows. Will this cause me any problems? or am I miss interpreting your statement. My partitions are

/dev/sd1 is 230.4M and /dev/sd2 is 14.3G

Some Wiki comments:

Taking the back off the Chromebox was tricky. Use the VESA mounting screws to grab the back more easily. This was probably the hardest step

Once the Chromebox is in developer's mode, it boots a little slower. The recovery screen stays up for a little while, you just need to wait till the Chromebox beeps twice.

Other than that the install was flawless. Much easier than jailbreaking or rooting a device.

[falgarin]

I used the script and ran it on an ASUS i3 version first time it partitions and reboots and repairs the chromeOS. I run it a second time and it says openelec install complete. First let me say that I did not remove the screw from the motherboard because while reading instuctions it says to do so if you want to remove the 30s wait or if you want to install stand alone versions, wait on boot up does not bother me so I left in screw. I run chromeOS by pressing cntr'l d on dev screen , no problem it works fine. I assume that to open openelec I press cntrl l on dev screen to run it, when I do that it says booting from Hard Drive and hangs with a blinking line.
First I want to say that I am a complete NOOB at doing this and would appreciate any help, what I want to do is run the xbmc part of openelec.
Thanks

[rukusx7]

Thanks for all the great info guys! Matt I'm not sure what I meant about the kernel now that I am thinking about it. It appears that not all distros come with a kernel that supports intel_pstate for cpu frequency scaling. I really dont know enough about it to know what to look for in a distro. Thank you Igor2014 for suggesting your current setup! It looks like something I might wish to try. I'm trying to keep this box as versatile as I can and that looks like a really nice setup.

[noggin]

I used the script and ran it on an ASUS i3 version first time it partitions and reboots and repairs the chromeOS. I run it a second time and it says openelec install complete. First let me say that I did not remove the screw from the motherboard because while reading instuctions it says to do so if you want to remove the 30s wait or if you want to install stand alone versions, wait on boot up does not bother me so I left in screw. I run chromeOS by pressing cntr'l d on dev screen , no problem it works fine. I assume that to open openelec I press cntrl l on dev screen to run it, when I do that it says booting from Hard Drive and hangs with a blinking line.
First I want to say that I am a complete NOOB at doing this and would appreciate any help, what I want to do is run the xbmc part of openelec.
Thanks

I removed the screw, and have a Celeron 2955U, and exactly the same thing happened to me. I switched to a full standalone OpenElec install - following the instructions again - and it worked fine.

[Matt Devo]

I hope I can answer everything the way you'd find useful.

I originally tried to install OpenELEC, following this guide: http://geekfreely.blogspot.com/2014/...chromebox.html

Per those instructions, you do some CMD Line changes to boot from USB & Legacy. That went fine and I went through and installed the OpenELEC image from USB but it didn't "take". I had installed the image according to directions from that site, using Win32 Disk imager.

I'm confused - nothing in those directions deals with a disk image or Win32 Disk Imager. There is an image version of OpenELEC available for download on the OpenELEC site, but it will not work on the ChromeBox (or any ChromeOS device). If you had followed those directions, you should have ended up with an older OpenELEC beta (3.95.7 I think) installed to the internal HDD, and a working version of the legacy BIOS (SeaBIOS).

At that point, the Chromebox would only let me get into the ChromeOS Recovery Screen by sticking the Paper Clip in the reset button while turning the Chromebox on. I could still perform a Chrome OS recovery at this point but it would never actually repair anything and upon reboot I would be in the exact same situation.

When you perform a ChromeOS recovery, it re-images the internal HDD with ChromeOS and re-flashes the original/stock legacy BIOS (SeaBIOS), which is completely broken - no keyboard input, no USB booting, etc. It does not, however, reset the boot flags (which set the boot delay and default boot [ChromeOS or legacy BIOS]). Which is why despite the reset, the box continued to boot almost immediately into the broken legacy BIOS.

I would end up on a screen that said:

Booting from Hard Disk
Early console in decompress_kernel
KASLR using RDRAND

Decompressing Linux....Parsing ELF...Performing Relocations..done
Booting the kernel

Any method of rebooting the box (except Paper Clip in the reset button) would just get me to that BIOS screen that ignored keyboard commands like ESC or CTRL-<whatever> and just stalled out at <Booting the kernel> with no option to change the boot device and would not respond to any keyboard commands.

This is what happens when you try to boot the stock legacy BIOS with only ChromeOS installed. Keyboard input is ignored, you can't boot from USB, etc. As you learned, you needed to hit CTRL-D prior to the legacy BIOS boot screen in order to get back into ChromeOS.

<snip>
Finally, I installed a bootable image to a MicroSD card in an SD adapter (Using Win32 Disk Imager) using the original OpenELEC image. By itself, it did nothing. But then I stuck the ChromeOS recovery flash drive AND the OpenELEC flash drive AND the OpenELEC image on SD into the Chromebox. That got me the 3-5 seconds to hit ESC and got me into the menu to choose my Boot Choice. I was able to install OpenELEC from the SD card at that point and everything has been working great since. Boots up great from the SSD and things have been smooth sailing since I got my Harmony Remote + FLIRC combo working with XBMC.

If there's some add'l info I can provide, I'd be happy to try to get it, but keep in mind I do not have any measurable experience with computers outside of Windows and basic Home Networking.

I'm not sure how you managed to get things working given what you posted here, but glad it worked out.

I didn't use your script to create a OpenELEC flash drive. I think I used Linux but I might have used Windows. Will this cause me any problems? or am I miss interpreting your statement. My partitions are

/dev/sd1 is 230.4M and /dev/sd2 is 14.3G

assuming you meant /dev/sda/1 and /dev/sda2, those are the correct sizes for an OpenELEC install on the 16GB internal HDD.

Creating the OpenELEC installer from Linux isn't a problem, assuming you get the correct version. Windows *can* be a problem if the USB flash device has multiple partitions, as the OpenELEC installer tool doesn't re-partition the USB device, it only reformats it.

Some Wiki comments:

Taking the back off the Chromebox was tricky. Use the VESA mounting screws to grab the back more easily. This was probably the hardest step

Once the Chromebox is in developer's mode, it boots a little slower. The recovery screen stays up for a little while, you just need to wait till the Chromebox beeps twice.

Other than that the install was flawless. Much easier than jailbreaking or rooting a device.

Appreciate the feedback - added a tip to help separate the two halves. There's already a note at the end of the Developer Mode section which mentions the 30s boot delay, as well as using CTRL-D to skip it. How can I make that more clear?

I used the script and ran it on an ASUS i3 version first time it partitions and reboots and repairs the chromeOS. I run it a second time and it says openelec install complete. First let me say that I did not remove the screw from the motherboard because while reading instuctions it says to do so if you want to remove the 30s wait or if you want to install stand alone versions, wait on boot up does not bother me so I left in screw. I run chromeOS by pressing cntr'l d on dev screen , no problem it works fine. I assume that to open openelec I press cntrl l on dev screen to run it, when I do that it says booting from Hard Drive and hangs with a blinking line.
First I want to say that I am a complete NOOB at doing this and would appreciate any help, what I want to do is run the xbmc part of openelec.
Thanks

seems like about 20% (number pulled straight from my butt) of people run into this issue with the OpenELEC dual boot option, and I've been unable to determine the cause. For almost all of them, performing a factory reset as described in section 1.3 of the wiki, followed by a full re-install of OpenELEC, seems to fix the issue. I have no idea what's different the 2nd time, or why a reset clears up the issue.

I removed the screw, and have a Celeron 2955U, and exactly the same thing happened to me. I switched to a full standalone OpenElec install - following the instructions again - and it worked fine.

The standalone option does seem to be less problematic at this point, but as noted above, a factory reset + reinstall of OE in a dual-boot setup seems to work for most people.

[Igor2014]

BTW before flashing new Matt's firmware with disabled TPM, I was playing with it today a little bit and found that TPM in fact is used by random number generator. Rngd thread is the one which prevents the box from going asleep.

[Matt Devo]

BTW before flashing new Matt's firmware with disabled TPM, I was playing with it today a little bit and found that TPM in fact is used by random number generator. Rngd thread is the one which prevents the box from going asleep.

the issue with the TPM is that the Linux kernel will timeouttrying to talk to the TPM on resume because it expects a defined TPM to be sent the TPM Resume command before returning to the OS. Coreboot would need to have more robust TPM support for that to work outside of ChromeOS, so that's why I disabled it for now.

[Igor2014]

BTW before flashing new Matt's firmware with disabled TPM, I was playing with it today a little bit and found that TPM in fact is used by random number generator. Rngd thread is the one which prevents the box from going asleep.

the issue with the TPM is that the Linux kernel will timeouttrying to talk to the TPM on resume because it expects a defined TPM to be sent the TPM Resume command before returning to the OS. Coreboot would need to have more robust TPM support for that to work outside of ChromeOS, so that's why I disabled it for now.

Just flashed new firmware. So far so good. I don't know why Linux kernel Rndg module is trying to use TPM at all. AFAIK celeron 2955 supports rdrand instruction.

[falgarin]

Thanks for all the help I received from Matt and the members, I did the factory reset, but did not remove the screw and it works just fine, Seems like the second time arround is the charm.
Thanks

[Matt Devo]

Thanks for all the help I received from Matt and the members, I did the factory reset, but did not remove the screw and it works just fine, Seems like the second time arround is the charm.
Thanks

glad to hear that worked.

removing the write protect screw is only necessary for standalone setups, or if you want to set the dual-boot boot options. If you're ok with the 30s boot timeout and having to hit CTRL-L to boot OpenELEC, then no need to remove it.

[knightbird]

Anyone have any idea if we can get Windows 7 installed Chomebox m004U? XBMC with Netflix would make a killer setup...

Of course if they ever get a Netflix plugin that works with Openelec, or XBMC (OSBMC) that would be great too.

(I know the stated reasons why Netflix hasn't been ported, so please let's not start that discussion again, which is why I asked about Windows)

[Matt Devo]

Anyone have any idea if we can get Windows 7 installed Chomebox m004U? XBMC with Netflix would make a killer setup...

Windows 8+ only

[Netix]

Anyone have any idea if we can get Windows 7 installed Chomebox m004U? XBMC with Netflix would make a killer setup...

Windows 8+ only

They're still hdmi sounds issue running Windows 8 on the Chromebox right ?

[Matt Devo]

They're still hdmi sounds issue running Windows 8 on the Chromebox right ?

I believe multichannel/bitstream output via HDMI is currently restricted (or broken) on the celeron/HD4000 due to Intel's drivers? I don't have a receiver with HDMI here to test unfortunately. Obviously not a hardware issue since it works fine in Linux

[falgarin]

Matt,
What is the best setup as to space for ChromeOS and Openolec when installed on a 16GB ssd?
Thanks