[smitbret]

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.

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. 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. 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.

That's how I ended up not able to get past anything until you recommended hitting CTRL-D as soon as things started up. That got me back into the Chrome Screen where I could hit CTRL-SHFT-F2 and follow your process for installing OpenELEC. However, I shortcutted by using my existing USB image of OpenELEC that I had created from the previous guide instead of following your shortcut on screen. Once again, it appeared to install, but upon reboot, it was back to the same BIOS screens that just stalled out at Booting Kernel. That really locked me up to where I couldn't even get to the ChromeOS Recovery screen at all. There were a couple of occasions where I managed to get the menu to choose my bootable source, but any drive I chose would just say it was an unbootable source. Those opportunities were few and far between (every 10 tries or so) and I couldn't tell you what combination of activities and key presses got me to that point.

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.

****Oops, just noticed you asked for a PM. I'll send this same info, there.*****