2026.3 - Container Update Fails

Hello. I’m trying to update my HA Container instance to v2026.3 but am getting the following errors. Can anyone help?

Pulling homeassistant ... download complete

ERROR: for homeassistant  failed to register layer: Error processing tar file(exit status 1): archive/tar: invalid tar header
ERROR: failed to register layer: Error processing tar file(exit status 1): archive/tar: invalid tar header
mqtt is up-to-date
mariadb is up-to-date
home-assistant is up-to-date
Total reclaimed space: 0B

Thanks,

John

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I’m not a container guy, but

from where?

I believe I’ve got the same issue.

The command I’m running is:

docker pull homeassistant/home-assistant:latest

The default is to pull images from Docker Hub?

When I run the command I see:

latest: Pulling from homeassistant/home-assistant
6231a87d3f7c: Extracting [==================================================>]   3.89MB/3.89MB
ed8cd9e42835: Download complete 
1c47301ccc91: Download complete 
...
2205db5745a2: Download complete 
2bbc25f46532: Download complete 
failed to register layer: Error processing tar file(exit status 1): archive/tar: invalid tar header

The line starting 6231a87d3f7c reaches the 3.89MB almost immediately but then sits there. So my guess is that the issue is related to that.

Maybe a faulty download? The servers are being hammered straight after release time, and that tapers off as the updates succeed. Some updates can be huge, and your connection intermittent. 3.89Mb sounds like the download ended prematurely.

Bring your system down clean, power off, and restart.

I’m guessing the update process will check the integrity of the tar file (which one?), re-download and merrily continue.

If the error is consistent, then suspect the image being downloaded is faulty, and file a GitHub issue for the developers to investigate.

This has always worked, pulling from, I assume, Docker Hub?

image: homeassistant/home-assistant:stable

Tried this, same issue.

image: gchr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
Bring your system down clean, power off, and restart.

Tried this, no luck.

Good. Consistency is important, good or bad.

Can you narrow down the offending file? Manually download it and verify the contents is intact? Document if corrupt or not. Are the files from both sources identical?

This would make your GitHub report more solid and get faster response for remediation.

Had this yesterday, docker version was (too) old and could not unpack these. Reïnstalling docker was no fun but…well… required, all fine now.
EDIT: old version: 20.10.xx

5 Likes

This was my issue! I somehow didn’t have docker’s apt repos enabled and so when I ran (on ubuntu) apt-get upgrade it wasn’t pulling down more recent versions!

With the updated version the new version is installing without an issue.

Thank you!

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Great, if posisble, please mark my post as solution so others can use this as well

Fixed my problem, thanks!

Can anyone explain how to update? Beginning with this version, I am unable to upgrade. I use Portainer to manage my container running on a synology device. What has always worked in the past was to stop the conatiner, and then do a pull/recreate from Portainer. This time however, it doesn’t actually pull the update and I am still on a February 2026 version.

I also tried manually updating from the synology directly and get this message:

Failed to pull image [failed to register layer: ApplyLayer exit status 1 stdout: stderr: archive/tar: invalid tar header].

Is it related to this note?

Home Assistant container images are now compressed with zstd instead of gzip . Since containerd has supported zstd since 2021, this is not expected to break current installations. If you are running a very old container runtime, make sure it supports zstd before updating.

Read the post? Update docker version

The root cause:

Quote: NOTE: As of 2021 (+5y), containerd already supports zstd, so this is not expected to break current installations.

Sadly, it did. Hence the tar headers were invalid. Why the outdated docker versions?

1 Like

Because synology.

Old docker versions can not decompress this
EDIT: I installed HA in 2022 and updated to Ubuntu 22.04 later, but not docker-ce which stayed on 20.10, till 2d ago this one forced me to do so
So, verify your docker and do not point to dates or years ago and assuming this is fixed by default

Unfortunately I am running with the latest version of Docker Synology provides. This is unbelievable.

Indeed,
I donot use HA on syno so never noticed this but 20.10 is already quite a while EOL.
With DSM7.2.x, it should bring the new version but this is not offered for me (or for my i218). An option is to step away from the official version, e.g. telnetdoogie/synology-docker … maybe there are others.

EDIT: possibly you can manually upgrade to 7.2 … or not, for me I would not as it removes video station apparenlty, who knows what else can go wrong

EDIT2: I was able to upgrade to docker 26.1.4 using telnetdoogie, a newer was not possible on my 218+ but at least it pulls HA properly. Prepare to reinstall all containers after the upgrade, it should migrate but none worked with me, You will also loose the use of syno-docker gui and have to use portainer, minor thing imo

Debian oldstable also ships with Docker version 20.10.24+dfsg1, build 297e128

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Linked to this posted. In short Docker users on Synology cannot update anymore. Need to roll back to 2026.2
Maybe this can help, did not try it yet …