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 Ubuntu’s 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). Don’t 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 Domoticz…
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!
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This is so bad. 
And this somewhat indicates that the balena etcher adware actually fiddles/messes with HaOS - probably “unintentional” 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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Thanks a lot @Damos, I had exactly the same problems (etcher freeze, HA Cloud services ko…) this post saved my day ! 
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Be aware there is a ‘fake’ balena etcher out there…
Is the fake etcher any better? Does it come without ads and trackers? Any link?
The discussion linked recommended that you don’t use etcher.
Here is another tool that was linked to.
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For your info, I was warning for the fake
And to answer your question: No…the original is Better;Without ads (except for their own) and without trackers (not sure, but according @orange-assistant there are issues).
Any Link? → balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives (this is the original, DO NOT USE THE FAKE, as it has all that you mentioned)
But as @pcwii said, you can use usb imager as well 
I read a little bit in the balena github repo and actually it looks like “some” fake etcher sites were just distributing old unmodified etcher binaries WITHOUT ANY ADS (but with all the tracking as this is part of etcher for a long period already).
I will avoid etcher for now thanks to all that information (it also has unfixed security issues according to devs on github).
USBimager looks great! They have a table on gitlab and (also) compare it with etcher - looks like it wins in all categories!
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What a lifesaver it was to find this thread. I had exactly the same issues two days ago, with my NUC, a fresh Ubundu live and Etcher. I have all the symptoms, I had the Ubuntu freeze, the dns container halting and have been tryting to get it to work for two days now. Thanks! I will try again with high hopes.
Update: 1 day later and success using sudo .\usbimager -a to be able to flash my SSD.
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I think it’s time update the HA docs to don’t suggest etcher (with it’s known vulnerabilities and trackers/ads) anymore as it looks like it is the root cause of many HA related problems (not limited to writing/flashing but also DNS manipulations?).
A quick look shows that for raspberry based installs the pi imager (and not etcher) is already suggested so it should be no problem to replace the docs which still promote etcher with usbimager I guess?
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I already raised that issue in GitHub: Flshing with Etcher results in faulty DNS behavior. · Issue #28706 · home-assistant/home-assistant.io (github.com).
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This is a balena etcher issue and have nothing to do with the image by itslef. I would recommend using the dd pre-installed tool in the live ubuntu image.
- Download haos_generic-x86-64-11-1.img.xz
- Unpack the image and you will get instead haos_generic-x86-64-11-1.img
unxz haos_generic-x86-64-11-1.img.xz - Flash the image to your device
sudo dd of=/dev/{YOUR_DEVICE} if=./haos_generic-x86-64-11-1.img bs=64k oflag=dsync status=progress
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Sadly you can’t verify the written image with dd.
But USBImager does that and isn’t bloated (ads, tracking, …) and broken (security issues, broken writes’ …) like etcher.
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I had this same issue today, it was a right pain.
Lenovo M75n IoT with M.2 SSD, installing HAOS.
Used a live Linux bootable USB (Ubuntu Desktop). Managed to install Balena Etcher easily enough, and download the image, but Balena Etcher failed to even start writing to the SSD.
Moved over to a Linux Mint bootable USB, and installed Balena Etcher, and it installed to 32% before the whole machine locked up. I left it for an hour or so, but it didn’t recover. However, when I rebooted, HA appeared to boot absolutely fine. Spent the next couple of hours playing around, before realising I had networking issues with anything external (logs showed issues with the weather integration, and I couldn’t migrate to MariaDB because the mirrors weren’t accessible). Everything pointed to DNS issues, but even manually setting the DNS server didn’t help. So, whilst I had assumed the image restore completed and maybe the graphics had just locked up, it definitely had not completed.
Tried various other methods, including an external USB caddy, but it wasn’t compatible. Also tried other disk imaging software, but none of them would detect the in-built SSD, they only worked for USB devices, and I didn’t have a suitable enclosure.
In the end, this guide did the trick. Used Ubuntu Desktop live again (as I had before), but installed Balena Etcher a different way, using an older version as per this guide. It threw a number of errors when installing Balena Etcher, but it did install and ran fine. It failed when using the URL, but downloading the image and selecting the file worked perfectly, got to 100% and successfully verified the write.
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Thank you very much, I was stuck on Balena at 32% and was trying for hours after testing your step by step tutorial. Works like magic! thank you again!
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