Can't install homeassistant on VirtualBox for over 6 months

[Mooncake]

A very long story short, I had a catastrophic failure with my server about 8 months ago, main drive failed, all backups of drive failed, all backups of homeassistant fail to restore (regardless of installing the exact version of homeassistant I was on).

Tried the restore process about 20 times on different pcs, on my main gaming desktop that has an i9 13900K, so I know it’s not CPU bound or anything like that.

Anyway I’m so bored of trying to get the restore to work I’ve decided I’m just going to start again, but I can’t even do that, installing a brand new copy returns this error every time, specs of the server;

i7-5960X
128GB RAM
512GB C drive SSD

I’m at a complete loss, I’m an IT manager by day so I’m not what you can consider a moron but I’m just lost as to what I’m doing wrong here.

I’ve tried uninstalling VirtualBox, it makes no change but does seem to work on my gaming PC if I install fresh, but have no idea how a fresh install can fail on one specific PC? Unless it could be driver related but how I’d figure that out I don’t know.

[aceindy]

VB sucks, VMWare player/workstation is 100% more reliable (but a bit harder to set up)

[Mooncake]

My main requirement is USB pass through so I can have zigbee/zwave, if that works I will setup whatever apart from a standalone Pi, because Pis suck

[aceindy]

VMWare supports USB passthrough

Installing Home Assistant on VMWare Workstation 16

Full guide here: https://smarthomepursuits.com/how-to-migrate-home-assistant-from-raspberry-pi-to-vmware-workstation/ I don’t often see HA users using VMware, but it has been nothing short of fantastic for me, so I thought I’d share my step-by-step guide of migrating from a raspberry pi to a VMware Player VM. By the end of this guide, you’ll have created a VMWare VM, restored from snapshot, and then I have two additional guides at the end that will 1. automatically connect the USB dongle of yo…

[Mooncake]

Is the error I’m getting likely due to be because of VB?

[os.habitats.tech (Habitats Tech)]

If you will be running a hypervisor on a Windows machine I suggest Hyper-V, as it comes with Windows and supports USB passthrough - Beginners’ Guide: Hyper-V USB Passthrough - BDRSuite.

If you want to BM install a hypervisor I suggest Proxmox VE.

[Mooncake]

Do you have USB pass through working on Hyper-V?

I remember ages ago I was trying to migrate to it but couldnt get Hyper-V USB pass through to work for love nor money!

[allard77 (Allard K)]

Can’t really help you with your specific problem but for me, Virtualbox works just fine. So it’s not that per se. I’m running it from Linux Mint, but I have successfully started an instance from VB on Windows too.
I assume you followed the exact instructions, there’s a few non-standard options that have to be checked IIRC.

[Mooncake]

Yeah I’ve followed the instructions to the T.

Just downloaded the VHDK for Hyper-V (as that is actually my preference, and if I can get USB pass through working we’re golden).

It booted up right away no problems… super weird!

[aceindy]

As far as i know, hyperV doesn’t support usb pass through

@Mooncake

Is the error I’m getting likely due to be because of VB?

Yes, it is.
When i started with HA, i used HyperV.
With the Zigbee i used then it was possible to configure it for ser2lan,.
When it died, i found out my new zigbee usb did not support ser2lan, so i needed to switch to another VM.

For my work i used VMware already with great satisfaction, but VB being freeware and all I figured lets give VB a try with HA.
But i found it was highly unstable (I had the same errors and I never found out what exactly the issue was).

So i moved to VMware and never looked back.
It is a bit harder to configure, but worth it

PS, Vmware’s player is freeware, but workstation is not. So i used my workstation on my work pc to set it up and configure it, and then moved it to player…that made it a lot easier

Unfortunately, USB passthrough is not natively supported in Hyper-V environments. However, you may still use the following methods to accomplish Hyper-V USB passthrough:

• Activate the Enhanced Session Mode.
• Start an RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) session.
• Install USB solutions that are network-based.
• Install USB solutions that are software-based.

For sure it wasn’t supported when i started with HA, not so sure now, but no intentions to move back, also because in the meanwhile i dropped W10, my host now runs Debian12.
(Originally i intended to run debian supervised, but found out it has too many restrictions )

[boheme61]

@aceindy

So i moved to VMware and never looked back

I started with VMware, but once tried VB and Hyper-V each, NO reasons to try ever again , if we just “ignore” VB, and look at Hyper-V vs VMware,
Windows will increase in usage much more, with H-V, and one never knows with Windows, if it’s not a slimmed dedicated “server”, then many things can happened with Microsoft Updates, last updates (for W10) was killing 2 machines here, took hours and i had to reboot 3 times , and who knows what changes they do that could affect H-V , VMware is just so much more reliable, and one can shut it down and copy/backup-the whole VM-folder, and fire it up on any other machine

[aceindy]

@boheme61

and copy/backup-the whole VM-folder, and fire it up on any other machine

Even when the old host is windows and the new one Linux