Why does one USB stick boot fully, the other partially?

I found on a German website that the right device-tree file for Mecool KII Pro 2G/16G is gxl_p231_2g_dvb.dtb and was finally able to boot when I renamed it and put it on a very old 8gb usb stick. After going through some of the menus, I shut it down and selected a 32gb, much faster stick, made the image, renamed the same dtb, put it in the same USB slot…and weirdness.
It gets to the stage where it creates some file structures, counts down to reboot, reboots to the Coreelec logo and after a few seconds reboots again in a loop.
I put the original USB stick in and it boots to the opening pages of Coreelec, just fine. So, then I copied all the files from the good normal stick to the abnormal stick. It booted, once again went through initializing file structures, rebooted and back to a loop.
What did I do wrong? Ah, I am using the latest build CoreELEC-Amlogic.arm-9.2.0-Generic.img. Looking into what may be written into the other partition on the two USB sticks…
The stick that doesn’t work has this in the log file:
INFO: loading settings
2019-10-15 13:42:20.907 T:4089155600 NOTICE: special://profile/ is mapped to: special://masterprofile/
2019-10-15 13:42:20.907 T:4089155600 ERROR: CSettings: unable to load settings from special://masterprofile/guisettings.xml, creating new default settings
2019-10-15 13:42:20.914 T:4089155600 WARNING: Failed to save the default settings to special://masterprofile/guisettings.xml
2019-10-15 13:42:20.914 T:4089155600 FATAL: unable to load settings

Check that it’s not a fake stick that claims to be 32Gb but is far less in reality.

There are a number of tools that you can use to verify including H2testw.

The stick was good. I also tried a 64GB microSD card and it too failed until I started Rufus as administrator. I did the same thing with the failing stick, but it never worked. I had tried the 64gb microSD 3 times with no luck. I cannot swear that running as administrator was the key, but I thought of it because of the error message in the log from the failed stick and thought maybe there was some kind of permissions problem passed on from using Rufus. Who knows. Next problem is how to shrink the display so that the edges of the setup screens fit and figure out how to get Youtube. Time to google…

You have to setup that on your tv.

Indeed that is what I did after googling and seeing I should set the TV to “computer” in the resolution settings. That took care of it. Next… cannot find TVheadend, only PVR clients. When I get home I will try SSH and apt-get install to see if that will work. Anybody know of instructions to be able to use the TV Tuner in the Kii Pro? I’m hoping this TVheadend will be the first half of the answer . I have a client installed but it has nothing to talk to.