Hi to all,
I have not been able to install Home Assistant on my Pi 3 B+ yet.
I’ve used BalenaEtcher successfully to flash a USB stick which I plugged into my Pi… but no boot on it, no sign of activity with the leds and nothing on the screen at all.
???
it must be written to a micro SD card, not a USB stick.
The only one SD card I have is for Raspbian.
I’ve used a USB stick for LibreELEC/Kodi. Is there a reason why it shouldn’t work for Home Assistant ?
Then overwrite it. You can download a raspbian image if you want it back.
Yes. Home assistant is not LibreELEC/Kodi.
Even Raspbian can live on a USB stick. So why not Home Assistant?
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md
Do you plan to run LibreElec/Kodi and HA on the same Pi? Because this will not work with the HA image as the HA image is intended to be the only software running on the Pi.
I understand that HA is a standalone app, so no I will not try to run Kodi.
For the time being I uncommented this in the config.txt file:
# uncomment if you get no picture on HDMI for a default "safe" mode
hdmi_safe=1
but it doesn’t do it… The only thing it does is modifying the HDMI setting to VGA and I can see a message on the screen. That’s all but it means that the config file at least is read.
The home assistant OS image boots from SD card. Follow the instructions to install it. Or choose an alternative installation method.
It seems there is a way
You don’t access HA through the HDMI port of the Pi, you access it through the webinterface under ip-of-your-pi:8123. If you attach an HDMI cable, you’ll only see the command line nothing more.
there are ways, but they are not officially supported (yet?). Can you explain why you want to run it from an USB drive and not from an SD card? Convenience only or to increase the life expectancy of the SD card?
Also that post is from 3 years ago. No gaurantee it will still work, and I would advise you to read the rest of the thread and the issues people had with that install method.
Can you explain why you want to run it from an USB drive and not from an SD card? Convenience only or to increase the life expectancy of the SD card?
The life of a SD card is highly reduced by multiple access so why not use the simple solution offered by USB sticks? I’m even thinking of moving the various apps I’m using to a HDD or SDD in the future.
Several things are not supported by the Foundation either but everything is moving, right? 
I know, I just wanted to know your reasons 
as you can see when reading the topic you linked it’s not so easy to to move it to an USB drive, this might change soon as the Pi4 now supports this natively but I don’t know any details.
Which foundation are you talking about? If you ever have an issue with this (and you are probably going to have issues with this until it’s officially supported) you can’t expect any support from the devs at all. It’s just a warning for a HA beginner like you 
No problems here booting from usb. Wrote the image with balena etcher. Booting is a little slower, thats all.
A little slower? You mean how long?
I have been waiting for at least 5 minutes without any sign of life on the screen or from the green led.
Thats not normal. Try this, shutdown the power of the pi, take out the usb stick, put it in your computer and mount the boot partition. With a text editor, open cmdline.txt, and delete the input there. Paste this in to the file, and safe the file.
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 cgroup_enable=memory elevator=deadline rootwait
Unmount your usb stick, en put it in to the py, boot the pi. Still no luck, format the usb stick en start over with a fresh install.
Do you have a good power adapter? 2.5A