I donāt think thatās too complicated if you consider Home Assistant as a platform. It wouldnāt be manageable by a ānormal userā anyways.
Even if youād take a Yellow, configuring HA and maintaining it needs a fair understanding of IT.
I did the installation from a Live USB Ubuntu onto a M.2 SSD Sata Drive in my newly purchased Lenovo M700.
I used Balena Etcher and I never got confirmation it flashed properly but HASS OS did boot up.
After restoring from a Full Backup, I ended up with some weird behavior with HACS. It came down to hassio-dns completely failing with a segmentation fault error.
cont-init: info: /etc/cont-init.d/corefile.sh exited 0
s6-rc: info: service legacy-cont-init successfully started
s6-rc: info: service legacy-services: starting
services-up: info: copying legacy longrun coredns (no readiness notification)
s6-rc: info: service legacy-services successfully started
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x17 pc=0xc00057]
goroutine 1 [running]:
gopkg.in/DataDog/dd-trace-go.v1/ddtrace/tracer.(*span).setTagError(0x136bf00, 0x7, 0x0, 0x7)
/go/pkg/mod/gopkg.in/!data!dog/[email protected]/ddtrace/tracer/span.go:131 +0x57
[11:16:17] WARNING: Halt DNS plug-in with exit code 2
This results in DNS resolution issues for Components.
Iām currently reinstalling using the step from @Damos with USBimager.
Iāll update if this resolved my issue or not.
Thank you
EDIT:
Itās working flawlessly from the start. So Etcher + Live USB + SSD x86-664 generic Storage does screw up things.
Thank you @Damos, you solve my headaches better than any acetaminophen.
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@irogoff, thanks for sharing.
I think, using USBimager as an alternative should be mentioned in the documentation. I will raise an issue there.
Best -
Damos
Hi, Thanks for the walkthrough. This is my first venture into Home Assistant. It is terribly hard. I used the supervised installation, but couldnāt install etcher. When found the dependencies, it hanged at 32%. The image still seemed to work but with all cloud based integrations not working.
I have used RPiās and have experience with programming and CLI. I tried the most basic installation method and I still canāt get it to work. I use a HP ELITEDESK 800 G3 MINI i5-7500T. Iāve got resilience, but even setting up home assistant seems to be too difficult for me :(.
3d day: Iāve been trying these steps but usbimager doesnāt show my SSD card, just the USB stick I use to boot. I followed all steps up untill step 10. There the SSD doesnāt show up in the dropdown of USBImager. Any ideas?
@JvDUnleashed, I recommend, when you start Ubuntu from the USB stick to start the hard disk utility (or whatever it is called), deleted all partitions from the SSD, and create one big ext4 partition.
Did this work?
Like the docs from usbimager suggested this is the default behavior but it can be as easy as attaching
-a when executing usbimager to have it shown all devices 
With ā-aā, all devices will be listed, even system disks and large disks. With this you can seriously damage your computer, be careful!
bzt / usbimager Ā· GitLab
And it should be seriously considered for a privacy respecting software like HA to ditch the suggestion of that etcher spyware completely. Not that it has a lotās of bugs and is build on a EOL browser it probably also violates the GDPR, only works with advertisements and leaks data to various companies around the globe before it can be disabled (opt-in). In all this fancy dd to write & verify a disk image has grown bigger than HaOS! As today etcher takes more than half a gigabyte with dependencies. That HA suggest a software which does not respect privacy and user choice (opt-in instead of opt-out like HA does it) is something quite sad - many projects stopped already suggesting balena etcher adware / spyware
USBImager shows that if you build a etcher like software without ads, trackers, eol browser and other dependencies it can do the same with a size smaller than half a megabyte (thatās thousand times less than etcher 
)
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Hi, That did work. Also, orange-assistantās suggestion worked. Etcher did itās job, USBImager did it faster. Apart from initial setup, HAās versatility and usablilty amaze me to no end. Iām so happy
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Hey, thanks for taking time writing the manual. Iām trying it the same way as youārem using Ubuntu.
I did everything, but my Usbimager doesnāt seem to see the ssd disk, even launched using sudo.
Any ideas on why that could be?
Yes, just read the last posts in this thread because four posts before yours @JvDUnleashed just asked the exact same question and confirmed it working just in the post before of yours! 
And welcome to the community by the way 
Tried it, sudo usbimager -a
Still nothing , although I see the SSD in the system with ext4 file system and mounted
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doesnāt look that way. Also they are talking about usb .
couldnāt make it work on Ubuntu. But worked great on Windows 10 custom live USB after using it with -a .
So yeah, overall is looks like Usbimager solves the problem when balena freezes on 4 percent or 31 or what even number you get.
My homeassistant loaded before after 31 percent freeze and it seems fine, but it doest not work properly.
So now hopefully it will work. So thanks for the tip!
UPD: works like a charm!
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Had the exact same issue, same HP thinclient T620. Using USB imager instead of Balena Etcher solved it.
Instead of Ubuntu used Manjaro as I had that ready on a bootable stick, worked just fine. I did not unzip the image prior to writing.
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Success! This worked for me. Thanks so much for taking the time to outline this step by step. The one tricky part for me was creating the one big Ext4 partition. I first tried Ubuntuās Disk utility. I could delete all the partitions from my previous install to create one big empty space. But when I tried to create the partition, despite selecting the whole space, it only let me create a tiny one at the front end of the empty space. So I switched to Gparted. It detected and fixed some issue and I was good to go.
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I just did the same.
Dell Mini PC. Boot off Ubuntu trial USB, Balena Etcher the HASS image to the internal SSD.
Was stuck at 32% for like 20 minutes and everything was frozen. Was just about to pull the plug. Came back some time later and the etch finished
That seemed to work for me too, HA initialized and did some discoveries.
But then I ran inDNS errors when installing/downloading custom integrations.
I did a new try with balena with the same result. (hanging balena, running HA, error when installing integrations). Donāt know how or why, but it seemed to be related.
But then I created 1 big partition and that made balena work and solved the DNS problem.
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Hello all, typically I am a reader of forums, not a poster, but I have to say I am very happy I found this tread and had to respond.
I ran into the same issue as described (Balena Etcher freezing while running Ubuntu LTS from an USB drive, while flashing HA to a TC520 Intel NUC). Multiple tries, stuck at 14% or 32%, but afterwards (typically a hard shutdown after an hour) HA was running so I thought all was good.
The radio and metrology integration not working was fine for me, but not getting Z-wave to integrate was extremely frustrating. Add-on was running perfect, but the integration could not connect, failed to connect or just ignored any response. I almost gave up completely to move back to Domoticzā¦
I have now done the same but with the USBimager instead of Balena etcher, flashing was quick and easy (same as above, used Gparted to make 1 ext4 drive of my NUC drive).
And now HA is running 10 times quicker, radio and metro work, Zwave JS UI add-on and integration were truly 1 minute to setup and everything works as it should.
Thanks a lot and I would definitely vouch for adding this option to the installation manual!
2 Likes
This is so bad.
And this somewhat indicates that the balena etcher adware actually fiddles/messes with HaOS - probably āunintentionalā like all trackers when the devs got burned 
The results of our investigation showed that Etcher will make connection to the following systems:
Connection Included intentionally Sentry YES Mixpanel YES Google Analytics (&doubleclick) NO Go Squared NO Facebook Pixel NO Gstatic .com NO jquery NO Cloudfront NO facebook .com/facebook .net NO
At this point HA should definitely stop suggesting using this spyware - not only does it not respect user privacy (opt-out VS opt-in) but also ads are mandatory with this badware based on a EOL browser (with known 0-day exploits 
) and easily being bigger than a HaOS image it should juat write
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As far as I remember I raised an issue in Git Hub or in the documentation site.
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