[Matt Devo]

Well, took Matt Devo's advice from the XBMC forum linked above. My TV wasn't synching up fast enough and when I hit CTRL-D from the moment I turned on the Chromebox, instead of waiting for the display, it got me into the OS far enough that I could CTRL-SHFT-F2. Anyway, followed his guide from there and got stuck again, even worse this time.

Anyway, after messing with 4 different flash drives, I finally stuck the bootable OpenELEC on a MicroSD card with adapter. I discovered that if I stuck that MicroSD card in along with the Chrome OS recovery image on Flash Drive and then booted with the paper clip in the reset hole then I had about 2 seconds to hit the ESC button and get the list of 3 bootable choices. I was able to then install from the SD card. This time it took.

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.

To be clear, with the Coreboot firmware installed, the recovery button has absolutely no function (which is why you have to re-flash your original firmware before restoring ChromeOS). And if there is more than 1 bootable device connected (ie, any USB or SD devices), you will have 5 seconds to hit ESC before it automatically boots the internal HDD.

Boots right into XBMC from the HDD and is running really smooth. For some reason the box just wouldn't recognize any of the flash drives as bootable. I must have not set up the boot configuration very well. I don't know. I could have sworn that I checked and double checked along the way.

Anyway, pretty pleased so far. I have a FLIRC as the IR receiver paired with my Logitech Harmony and I still need to get the delay settings correct, there's some pretty bad lag, but I should be able to get ironed out.

Thanks for the help.

If you have USB flash drives which are not detected by the SeaBIOS boot menu (which is different than being detected, but not booting from it), then please PM me so I can walk you thru getting me the firmware boot log and I can see what's going on. And be sure to let me know the date stamp in the SeaBIOS version string on the boot menu.