Configuration went valid to invalid without making changes, how do I even access it now?

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Installed Home Assistant Operating System on brand new Raspberry Pi 4B via hass.io instructions (Balena etcher onto SD card, insert and boot).

Yesterday I was working on automations and all worked well. I was checking configuration.yaml repeatedly and it was always valid. After last check of the day it was valid and I made no further changes.

Today I sat down to work on more automations but the file editor won’t respond or restart, I checked configuration through developer tools and configuration is now invalid!

Error if I attempt to restart: “The system cannot restart because the configuration is not valid: Error loading /config/configuration.yaml: ‘utf-8’ codec can’t decode byte 0xd8 in position 26: invalid continuation byte”

I actually sort of understand the error, but how does one communicate with HaOS to fix the configuration.yaml if the error is preventing file editor and terminal from working? (Neither will start or restart). I have the board IP, is there a way to get a command line access on it with HaOS running?

2

In case anybody is curious I eventually just decided to reboot at the hardware level.

HaOS came back up with valid configuration but all add-ons, automations, and the paired ZigBee devices were lost. Such is life.

If anybody knows a way to, for example, log into HaOS on Raspi over the network to troubleshoot when add-ons won’t work to let you edit yaml, I’d love to learn that.

3

you could always pop out the SDCard and mount it onto your PC and edit the configs from there

4

Something edited your configuration.yaml file and saved it as ASCII/ANSI instead of unicode. It mangled any extended characters used (ie. Celcius symbol).

Try opening your configuration.yaml up in a unicode aware editor (ie. Notepad++, VSCode) and saving it as unicode.