Solved Prevent Booting from Specific Removable Media Drives

[GrimFusion]

I run Recalbox and Kodi from an Odroid XU-4 and I have AnyExternal set as my boot device option. For the most part, that works, but I have two 6TB hard drives I use with Kodi to play stored media.

It'd be nice to have a boot profile on one, not the other - and leave them both plugged into my XU4 to prevent excessive cable/port wear, so I'm looking for a more granular way to control which drives RecalBox writes boot profiles to.

Is there something I can change the recalbox directory name to or a file inside I can modify to tell RecalBox to stop looking at said drive for boot profiles?

I've tried writing all of the boot devices I want active then changing the boot option to Internal, but that ended up borking my entire Kodi library and I had to recreate it from scratch.

[paradadf]

@grimfusion you can select from which specific external device should recalbox boot. Just name them differently.

[GrimFusion]

@paradadf said in Prevent Booting from Specific Removable Media Drives:

you can select from which specific external device should recalbox boot

I get that, but it's tough to explain what I'm aiming for, I guess. I have an XU4 with a MicroSD card in it I prefer to boot from if I'm just running emulators. I also have two 6TB external HDDs I often plug in to watch stuff in Kodi. The first of the two HDDs has a recalbox boot profile on it and the second one isn't supposed to.

Whenever I boot my XU4 with both external HDDs plugged in, Recalbox seems to write a new boot profile to the secondary drive, and from that point on, it's almost random which external HDD Recalbox chooses to boot from, but when it chooses the wrong one, it boots into a blank profile with no access to my emulator or media paths.

I've been just manually going in and deleting the /recalbox directory on the secondary drive, but that only works until I accidentally boot with both drives plugged in again. I guess I could give up on the dual booting idea and store my boot profile on the internal SD then recreate paths to all my media directories, but that would make for a pretty messy library in both recalbox and kodi.

Is there anything I can do with the config files in the recalbox directory on the secondary drive to tell Recalbox to skip trying to boot from the drive?

[voljega]

@grimfusion do not use AnyExternal as boot option but the name of the hdd you want to use

[GrimFusion]

Okay, I think I got it now; Sorry for seeming obtuse. The setting is a little confusing because it asks about Storage. I figured that meant I should be pointing it at my storage drive, not the one I wanted to boot from. I should have probably realized it didn't mean storage when it started writing boot profiles to everything I plugged in.

Last time I tried to tweak the Storage setting, I didn't have either of my externals plugged in for fear my Kodi library would be overwritten, so I wasn't even aware single drives could be selected as long as they're detected on boot.

Might I suggest renaming the setting "Boot Profile Device" in the English version so the intent is a little more clear? Anyway, all solved. Thanks for the assist, y'all!

[voljega]

@grimfusion actually it is not at all the boot device which is still the sd card, but it is the storage device of all user data (configuration, roms, bios, saves, etc) so it is rightly named.

Kodi's storage is kodi's problem and is to be handled by kodi alone, recalbox doesn't do anything at all about it.
Kodi is just slighty integrated but all you see in Emulationstation menus is related to Recalbox and emulation, not Kodi

[GrimFusion]

I totally understand that. With the Storage option in Recalbox set to AnyExternal, Recalbox was writing boot profiles to every device I plugged in. Since a fresh boot profile gets written, so do basic Kodi files, and every time I'd inadvertently load a boot profile from a drive I didn't intend to, loading either RecalBox or Kodi resulted in my entire rom/media libraries getting overwritten.

I fussed with that option so much trying to get it to work that I was scared of booting into RecalBox with my external hard drives plugged in at all; which means I never saw the option to set a static individual drive as a Storage option.