How to install openELEC to a HD or USB

[jas0npc]

Cool man.. Nice to hear. You mean 1000/450/450 +6 I hope. Heh. A core and sdram at 950mhz sounds a little extreme to be true. sdram is also hardcoded to not go above 600Mhz in the firmware as far as I know.

Also watch it at updates since this is the only occurrence when the RPi needs to write to the sdcard now.

lol sorry yes 450 450

could do with a nice little slider to bring the oc back for updating

 

[tuxen]

I can make a script for you? Or you could modify the dev update tool to do it for you?
A extra reboot would be required though after upgrade. To set the overclock back.

All you need todo is remount /flash/ then mv config.txt to config.bak before reboot, then after upgrade do the oppersite then reboot. Still a bit awkward.
This could be done in initfs and there also is a patch but then you need to make the builds yourself. :/

Or maybe you can use this config.txt parameter:
initial_turbo Enables turbo mode from boot for the given value in seconds (up to 60) or until cpufreq sets a frequency. Can help with sdcard corruption if overclocked. Default 0 [6]
The only thing that worries me is the "until cpufreq sets a frequency"

Or maybe you won't have a problem at all! I would try that first. Just have a backup ready of your fat partition. And things can be restored in no time.

 

[jas0npc]

Suddenly taking out the sdcard and using a text editor does not seem to bad lol

 

[tuxen]

Lol.. Yeah.. But try without modifying anything.
As said just backup the fat partition files first so you can revert fast if it fails.

 

[tuxen]

And please feedback if it worked or not.

 

[mahockey]

Guys I read a post a couple of weeks ago (which i cannot find now) which had recommendations and speed results of the best 3.0 USB stick to use.

Anyone any idea where that thread is ?

 

[ute]

I remember the post but can't find either
But Basicly the best was the SanDisk extreme 3.0 16 gig
This what I bought but have had no time to load it

 

[Mcord]

is the main benefit to this just scrolling through libraries? I have been following the thread and best I can tell no system operations such as opening addons and what not will increase as it remains on the sd card. The process here will just improve read write of thumbnails and fanart, or will it also improve response from skin moving through menus? I am close to pulling the trigger on getting myself the usb 3 drive but my once $35 Pi has turned into a $100+ item when you take into account additional sd cards, cases, psu, etc etc. I enjoy tinkering with it so I am not really complaining just when you start doing the math it starts to add up.

 

[ute]

That's the truth, but it's all the tweaking that's fun.

Yes as far as I understand it just speeds up the items you said no system file speed upgrade

 

[tuxen]

It speed up addons when its building metadata. The same that is happening when you build a library. Building of my library went from 2 hours to 20mins. The same will happen in Ic*f*lms, 1Ch**nel, movie2k, movie25, TV-release, etc. so it's when building caches fetching new metadata so you can imagine that you really will see a big difference here (it's about as fast as a PC fetches it) so I would consider this the main benefit.. It will also make some external skins run a little faster but these are not the problem really.

As a bonus the fanart will also load instantly when you browse movies ie. I guess you can say the last real bottleneck is lifted. It's all been well explained, and RPi is a tinkering device I would never go out and buy expensive new hardware explicit for XBMC on RPi. As said I'm using a old 1.8" mini harddrive I had laying around. The USB sticks I had was to slow and if I was gonna buy use something else I probably would have waited untill a fast usb3 stick fell in my hands for a reasonable price so I allways could use it for other projects on RPi or another device or used one of the existing SSD device's I own.
Also I never installed it for a friend this way who did not have the parts laying around already.

As said all that we are talking about is a bit geeky but most of us love it. You could settled with a sdcard only and no tweaks but that's not what makes it fun to me. The budget is still small regarding the RPi for me and I have no dents on my budget at all.

I like my rpi's for their versatility as said one of them is gonna run my server and it sure is gonna save me some power, noise, and whole setup in general. I plan on running it headless from a 3.5" external HD, with a LCD display showing load and bandwidth throughput. Again as a hardware geek I already have some displays, electronic components and various non RPi but fit able cases laying around.

Regarding how open and hacker friendly this device is its still the best 30£ I've spent in a long time there really is no obstructions to make it do what you want and that's want I like..

 

[jas0npc]

for the 7 uk pound it cost, it is so worth it, there are more addons coming from new devs who are also using Metadata, I dred to think how long it would take tubeplus to cache all 120 episodes it caches nearly every day or so on tv latest releases... even my wife has noticed the difference, and if you have ever read what I put here, when ever I change anything on the pi, I always alter the theme and tell her it must be an update

 

[Mcord]

You could repartition the drive and create a small 20gb ext4 partition. I have used http://www.partitionwizard.com/ in the past and it works very well.

I have a 2TB hard drive connected to my pi with 2 partitions already. One is for time machine backups of my mac the other is DOS and used for general storage on pi and other devices connected to network

so I would be able to split my main partition using this and create an ext 4 partition of a size of my choosing and label it storage then change the cmdline.txt as explained in op on my sd?

 

[nothere]

I have a 2TB hard drive connected to my pi with 2 partitions already. One is for time machine backups of my mac the other is DOS and used for general storage on pi and other devices connected to network

so I would be able to split my main partition using this and create an ext 4 partition of a size of my choosing and label it storage then change the cmdline.txt as explained in op on my sd?

Yep indeedy format as an ext4 primary partition.

 

[ute]

So how do I use the image I have on my SD card now ?

It is the Mark Rich image ( i have it set up perfectly right now )( openelec 3.0)

I would not be so lucky as to be just cut and paste the image from SD to USB would I ???? or I read that I can use win32diskimager if so how is this done ?

next ...since these files are already on the SD
bootcode.bin, cmdline.txt, config.txt,
fixup.dat, kernel.img, LICENCE.broadcom,
openelec.ico, README.md, start.elf, SYSTEM

do I still have to format the card and add them ? ( basically just leave the image as is except for the editing the cmdline.txt)

Thanks for any help

 

[nothere]

So how do I use the image I have on my SD card now ?

It is the Mark Rich image ( i have it set up perfectly right now )( openelec 3.0)

I would not be so lucky as to be just cut and paste the image from SD to USB would I ???? or I read that I can use win32diskimager if so how is this done ?

next ...since these files are already on the SD
bootcode.bin, cmdline.txt, config.txt,
fixup.dat, kernel.img, LICENCE.broadcom,
openelec.ico, README.md, start.elf, SYSTEM

do I still have to format the card and add them ? ( basically just leave the image as is except for the editing the cmdline.txt)

Thanks for any help

If you gonna use a dedicated USB stick just back up your SD card image and write it to USB stick using win32diskimager. Then change the cmdline.txt on sd card as per tuxens instructions. Pop the SD card in and plug in the USB, power up the pi and jobs a good en.
That's the easy way.

 

[Mcord]

I am trying to use an external hard drive with a partition formated to ext 4 and labled STORAGE. it is saying can't create directory because storage is read only but if I boot my other sd I can see the partition and write to it without issue. Is it possible to use the image on just the partition of the hard drive?


Edit

Got it. Since my hard drive has multiple partitions I needed to change sda1 to sda3. All is well up and running. Big thanks for the guide tuxen and to metalketle for the tip on the partition tool. First impression, I see what you mean about the fan art loading instantly.

 

[tuxen]

If you gonna use a dedicated USB stick just back up your SD card image and write it to USB stick using win32diskimager. Then change the cmdline.txt on sd card as per tuxens instructions. Pop the SD card in and plug in the USB, power up the pi and jobs a good en.
That's the easy way.

Also if you do not remove the partitions from the sdcard before format and go for the quick way put boot=/dev/mmcblk0p1 instead of mmcblk0 in cmdline.txt since two partitions where created on the sdcard by the image. Also you will have double partitions in XBMC not that it matter as long as you know which is which.

 

[ute]

Okay hopefully will have time this weekend, it's hard to when Wife wants to watch "her" shows......lol..........hey Hon just let me shut that down for a bit......not going to happen we all know

 

[Canaya]

Hi tuxen, Linux noob here. In the op between step 6&7, you mention a 3rd party folder. Can you elaborate on what that 3rd party folder is? Thx. I hope it's not a stupid question.

 

[bullsboy]

When you download the .tar file of openelec there are a number of folders. The files in the 3rd party folder are what you need at that step