[prozach1576]

I've had XBMC Live running perfectly on an HTPC I built for a few months now. It was booting off an 8 gig USB drive and connected to my receiver over HDMI.

Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H
E5200 CPU
2 GB RAM

I didn't use it for about a week and a half and went to boot it up today. It booted to the main menu like normal. I didn't use it for a few minutes because I was fiddling with my iPhone to fix the XBMC remote config. The remote app said it was connected to XBMC but the menu was unresponsive. I let it sit for a few minutes, then plugged in a keyboard to see if it was an issue with my phone, but it was still unresponsive.

I did a hard reboot on the case. The BIOS loaded fine and it booted to the USB stick like normal and picked the Nvidia GPU option on the boot loader like it always does. Then, like normal, the glowing "XBMC" logo showed up for a few seconds, but then it went haywire. The signal alternating from being out, to static, to a split second flash of command line-ish text in the upper left saying what *looked* (couldn't get a clear read even after trying this multiple times) like

"Hardware abstraction layer [unsure of the last word or two"
Long file path
Long file path
"Hardware abstraction layer [unsure of the last word or two"

It just kept on going from black to static to a flash of that text and back. I did this a few times but I was worried it would be hard on my TV. Next I connected the box to my desktop monitor with DVI and had the exact same thing happen (no static this time, just going from black to no signal to a brief glimpse of text).

Next, thinking maybe my drive was corrupted, I tried booting from the XBMC Live CD and the same thing happened again.

This leads me believe that I have some kind of hardware failure. Any idea what it might be? Or is something else going on?

[prozach1576]

Further info:

I just discovered that I AM able to boot into safe mode and get to a command line on both the Live CD and my USB drive. I have no idea what to do when I get there though (not an experienced Linux user...only know what you learn about the command line in some programming classes).

I also tried booting a Windows 7 installation disc, loaded fine.

The text that I was seeing flash onto the screen before is

Code:

*Starting hardware abstraction layer hald
chown: failed to get attributes of '/var/log/dmesg': no such file or directory
chown: failed to get attributes of '/var/log/dmesg': no such file or directory
*Checking battery state

I could tell because it's what was on the screen in safe mode immediately above XBMC asking for my login.

What the hell is going on?

[harryzimm]

Try loading in safe mode, log in and type,

Code:

sudo rm /home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml

then

Code:

sudo reboot

cheers

[prozach1576]

Try loading in safe mode, log in and type,

Code:

sudo rm /home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml

then

Code:

sudo reboot

cheers

I just tried that. It spit back three lines saying something about FAT32 and, I think, "file system panic" (I should have taken a picture of the screen since I'm swapping my display back and forth between my PC and the XBMC box). After rebooting I had the same thing happen. Just in case, I booted to safe mode and tried that command again. This time it said there was no such file, so apparently it really did get removed.

I'm a little unclear about why both my installed version of XBMC Live AND the Live CD are both hanging...

[prozach1576]

Anyone? This thing is a brick until I get this figured out.

[Allen626]

You can try doing a filesystem check to see if for some reason something got corrupted.

Boot into safemode and get a command line and do 'df' to list the mounted filesystems then

fsck /dev/sda1 (or whatever the mounted filesystem is)

[exus]

I've been having the same exact problems as prozach with my fresh install. I cant get the system I put together to do anything besides this error. Harryzimm's suggestion didn't do anything to change it. Any luck tracking down what might be causing this?

Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G
AMD Athlon X2 processor
2GB Memory

[prozach1576]

I've been having the same exact problems as prozach with my fresh install. I cant get the system I put together to do anything besides this error. Harryzimm's suggestion didn't do anything to change it. Any luck tracking down what might be causing this?

Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G
AMD Athlon X2 processor
2GB Memory

So you have tried booting the Live CD too? That is what's most confounding to me. It would't be a big deal if my USB stick installation was corrupted because all of my media is streamed from my desktop PC, so I could reinstall with impunity. But the Live CD won't work either. Yet a Windows 7 disk will boot and load the installation screen? Later this week I will try putting a hard drive in it and installing Windows 7 or regular Ubuntu.

[prozach1576]

Anyone?

[kees1869]

I have a Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H too and had the same problem. It also fails to recognize my SSD (corrupts it). No problems under Moblin or Arch Linux though.