I have RPi5 8Gb with Pimoroni NVME Base + SSD Samsung 980 500Gb connected through NVME (not USB)
I’ve spent several days trying to make HA works on this setup with huge number of fails.
Short story:
The main issue was with Raspberry Pi Imager - it makes not bootable image on SSD or SD Card. Once I’ve used Balena Etcher - HA starts to boot from the SSD (or SD, I tried both).
Long story:
I have old RPi3 with 1Gb RAM and experienced some troubles with Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB dongle when Zigbee2MQTT addon going to reset preiodically. I think because of out of RAM memory and freeze during swap activated watchdog to reset the addon. So, I decided to move to more powerfull HW. I’ve made an HA backup with all addons switched Off option for “Start on boot”, because I saw a topic with the issue specifically with RPi5 and HAOS 11.4 related on this.
I’ve flashed Rasperry OS lite via Raspberry Pi imager on SD card and made a first boot of RPi5 - all worked well.
I’ve changed
sudo rpi-eeprom-config --edit
by adding PCIE_PROBE=1 and changing boot order to NVMe SSD by BOOT_ORDER=0xf416
after that I’ve flashed haos_rpi5-64-11.4.img.xz on SSD and rebooted RPi5 without SD card with expectation to see the installation screen over http, but nothing happened. I’ve tried different releases like 11.3.rc1, 11.3., 11.4.rc1 with the same result (no boot). I always have used Raspberry PI imager for it, because it provides possibility to set WiFi settings and other useful options.
But when I flashed Raspberry OS on the SSD (or SD card) - it boots and works well, without any problems.
During the investigation I’ve updated eeprom
sudo nano /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update
change the FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS from “default” to “latest”
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo reboot
sudo rpi-eeprom-update
This should report at least firmware 2023-12-06 or higher.
It didn’t change anything, but good to have latest version.
So, finally I’ve used Balena Etcher to flash HAOS 11.4 image on SSD and it started to boot, showed installation screen in web browser and I used the backup to restore all my HA configuration.
The addons Mosquitto broker and Zigbee2MQTT started automatically, even with Start On Boot switched Off, I’ve just switched them On and made a full reboot.
I tried to full, quick and power disconnection reboot - without any problems. It booting every time now without any problems.
I hope it helps to other readers of this forum.