2 or 3 weeks ago I got a NUC and installed HA under Virtual Box as a VM. I was later advised against this and the advice was good but I was some way down the road and deep into learning HA and couldn’t quite face learning Proxmox as well (and I wanted to run some windows software too). So good advice which I didnt take so please be gentle! I got everything I needed running to my liking and so decided to tidy up the cupboard where the NUC resides. Now when I boot HA it starts in ‘rescue’ mode. CTRL-D continues the boot but hangs at “Waiting for the Home Assistant CLI to be ready…” for a couple of minutes before dropping back to rescue mode. I have set up a backup but now find that I should have setup google drive backup or similar as reading up tells me I cant access the standard backup if HA is not running.
So am I screwed and have to start again? It isn’t a massive setup and with the learning I have done I could set it up in half the time…
Any suggestions (other than I told you so 
) welcome.
Thanks
You can run both HAOS and windows as their own VMs on Proxmox VE.
You can either download and then upload your backup from google drive or try a factory reset via ha os datadisk wipe and see if onboarding works then.
First I would check if the network cable is ok and connected properly. Next I would check the logs for clues.
Thanks for the speedy replies. I don’t have a google backup - I setup backup in HAOS but only found out about google backup (and others) after reading up trying to solve this problem. Network cable is all fine as it works in windows.
Here are two screenshots> The first shows it booting into rescue mode…
And this on is the last page of the journalctl -xb command…
I suspect the 'Failed to open watchdog device /dev/watchdog" is a clue but meaningless to me.
I’d probably just attach a fresh disk image then. Can you share the VM config?
Is this another ‘VM hung’ scenario like the others reported quite frequently lately?
Save having to ask the same questions here and get the same suggestions, can you try looking at those and see what makes yours different, otherwise I’m sticking with my theory that there is a faulty CORE OS release.
There was a new release showing in HA before this crash but I chose not to install it just yet. So unless HA auto installs an update it is not that. And yes I did have a good look around here before posting but nothing I found helped solve the problem. But thanks for replying.
I’ve read nothing but VirtualBox problems for years. which is why it is recommended against. Plus, if an OS runs fine on bare metal, but not in a VM, isn’t it way more likely to be a VM problem not emulating the hrdware well enough? One could also blame bare metal for not hanging like the VM does but that does not make sense.
Right, ive also wondered since i started, as i also started With HAOS VM in Debian, later switched to dedicated windows-laptop, also with HAOS VM
And i kept reading Topics about reboots, hanging, crashing etc. etc.
My VM’s ?, Ive never had similar Problems ( 1 time in Debian, after i installed a packet, in Debian ) , that was when i decided to use my old laptop
My Conclusion, I Have Always used VMWare, absolutely NOT VirtualBox !
When i’ve read Reddit and Google hits, in effort to assist people here, Ive seen lots of issues in regards to VirtualBox, Not only in the context of a HA installation
My Conclusion, VirtualBox is fragile/immature( from a commercial safety perspective , A playtoy ), and used by people which just follow mainstream , or first hit on google.
(just check their github, In NO Way, they have had such few Issues as it NOW states on their github, so in fact they “wipe/hide” their loong history of bad track-records)
Thanks for the help posted here but yesterday I decided to bite the bullet and start again from scratch. The first thing I did was setup Google drive backup! Anyway I am now 90% up and running. My desktops might not yet be as pretty as they were but are mostly functional.
A lesson learnt…
make sure you download the emergency kit and keep it on google drive as well, you cant restore without the key. I believe you can disable it but not sure why you would.
It would be exciting to hear if you get to 100% and how you did it.