Broken error could not parse json content

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi there,

Apologies in advance… I’m new to home assistant. I successfully installed to my raspberry pi 3b with a number of addons and integrations all working successfully. I’ve now reached a point whereby the UI is completely inaccessible, and after plugging in pi via hdmi and trying a couple of things I get this error log:

IMG_3257
IMG_32571920×1154 260 KB

Is this an easy fix? Is there not enough information to determine a fault?
It’s seemingly after I updated to 2023.11.3 had the issue so I rolled back to 2023.11.2 to no avail. It was working for a time after the update, but required hard resets often (pi power off and on).

Thought I’d check here before setting up afresh - and learning a lesson how important backups are!

2

hm…
it seems that there might be an invalid character in your core.config file…

Can you access this file from your computer or within the CLI?

{
  "version": 1,
  "minor_version": 3,
  "key": "core.config",
  "data": {
    "latitude": removed,
    "longitude": removed,
    "elevation": 0,
    "unit_system_v2": "metric",
    "location_name": "Home",
    "time_zone": "Europe/Berlin",
    "external_url": null,
    "internal_url": null,
    "currency": "EUR",
    "country": "DE",
    "language": "de"
  }
}

The error is showing, that the ‘0xff’ could not be decoded… which is an invalid byte in the UTF-8 specs

3

Thanks CChris,
I found the core.config was empty, so populated it with some of the JSON in your snaphot kindly provided. Still no luck, appears to wipe the file empty. Think I’m out of my depth so have opted for fresh install of image again. I suspect I’ve hard reset my pi during a critical step and its corrupt one or many things.

I did however learn a little bit of CLI that might be useful for other novices if have a similar issue:

  • used a search to find core.config lives in mnt/data/supervisor/homeassistant/.storage/core.config
  • used cd to navigate to the homeassistant folder and then cd again for .storage (as . means folder is hidden)
  • vi core.config opens an editor, esc :q! closes with changes

No idea what I was doing!