[Matt Devo]

Hey Matt,

Ok so I never said I couldn't press Ctrl+D, anything related to booting into ChromeOS was not a option for me, whenever I pressed Ctrl+D at the developer screen it did try to boot ChromeOS but then it said the owner had disabled boot in dev mode, the article below talks about the function, the person I bought it from should have un-enrolled it or removed it from whatever organization it got it's policy's from, way too long ago to do anything about now, I tried to find a picture of the screen on Google but couldn't.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/iss...?id=412587

ok, then you should have booted a Linux ISO from USB and run the script from there; Using the Recovery media when not needed (and when set to boot in legacy mode by default w/short delay) caused a lot of avoidable headaches.

Not sure about the lucky part of the USB being enabled, are you saying that there's a number of Chrome devices out there where Ctrl+U is not enabled in the stock firmware ?, even if it's switched to dev mode ? or maybe it's a dev mode specific flag ?, because if the stock Legacy Boot does not have funtioning USB ports and stock firmware dev mode has no function to tell it to boot USB then it's kind of useless, even in my case, the coreboot firmware hands off to the Legacy Boot, so even though Ctrl+U flag was on, what initiated the boot off the USB stick if the Legacy Boot had non functioning USB ports ?, did coreboot skip the handover to Legacy Boot or something ?, just trying to understand what happened there because what you said has confused me quite a bit.

From the Developer Mode boot screen, there are 3 (non-recovery) paths: CTRL+D boots ChromeOS (using the ChromeOS payload, depthcharge) from the internal storage; CTRL+U boots ChromeOS/ChromiumOS (using the ChromeOS payload, depthcharge) from USB; CTRL+L boots the legacy boot payload (SeaBIOS).

When one switches to Developer Mode initially, CTRL+U and CTRL+L are disabled; you have to manually enable them using the Developer Mode boot flags (dev_boot_usb and dev_boot_legacy, respectively). When you install the Legacy BIOS update via the script, it sets the legacy boot flag for you; it does not set the USB boot flag.

In your case, at some point the dev_boot_usb flag was set, allowing you to boot ChromiumOS via USB. And since doing so is unrelated to Legacy Boot mode, the non-functional factory SeaBIOS didn't come into play. (Side note: more ChromeOS devices than not have a non-fully-functional or non-existent Legacy Boot mode. It's not considered a core component, so if it's working when they ship a given device, then great. That's why 99% of ChromeOS devices benefit from the RW_LEGACY firmware updates I provide.)

For quote 6 about not seeing anywhere that said coreboot firmware flash updates SeaBIOS, a small disclaimer or notice under the heading of "Install / Update: coreboot Firmware (standalone)" on the 1st page of this thread I think would make a world of difference, something like "NOTE: Flashing/updating the coreboot firmware updates SeaBIOS at the same time"

it's much more clear on my website (https://mrchromebox.tech -- lots of in-depth info there) but not so much on the Kodi side - I'll address this.

Regarding the bad firmware flash, is there a verification of any kind performed after it's flashed the coreboot firmware to ensure the data was written correctly ?, if not, then yeah a bad flash could be possible, he said that the device powers off immediately, I would have though a failure of the VBIOS which hangs the boot process would just hang, not cause it to actually power itself off.

the flashing app (flashrom) reads back each block it writes and compares to the file, so bad flashes are extremely rare.

if the VBIOS hangs due to lack of connected display, it doesn't power off by itself, but it does power off immediately when the power button is pressed (ie, doesn't require holding for ~5-10s), which is the same behavior as a bad flash

PS: The stuff you've done is insane(the good kind), I don't want you to think I'm trying to knock you or have a go or anything.

thanks, it's really hard to provide the "right" level of detail for this kind of stuff sometimes. Most people want a simple step-by-step that tells them what to do without the why. I think for something like flashing custom firmware, a certain amount of "why" is needed, but hard not to get lost in the weeds sometimes. My site is very weedy, bu that's the target demographic so it's ok.