HA Green partially bricked help

Installation
1

It has been a terrible day. I’m pulling my hair out after trying everything I can think of, and using this post as a last resort. I am a HA newbie (only had my HA Green for 4ish months) so go easy on me. HA Green has done wonders for me in the last few months, I had a healthy Zigbee mesh and a nice Thread network with 100+ devices in the house. Smooth sailing until…

I woke up this morning to my HA showing my wife and I the onboarding page, completely out of nowhere. Not good… but not the end of the world, as I had a backup from literally last night. Downloaded that from Google Drive, uploaded it… it tells me the backup encryption key I have is incorrect. That’s weird, I did not change it. After a few hours of troubleshooting that trying to see if I could somehow reverse engineer the key, I gave up.

Ok, my dashboards were kind of stale and I had been wanting to switch from ZHA to Z2M for a while now, so maybe this is my opportunity to start fresh, completely start over? I convinced myself that is ok, and started down that path. I decided to factory reset the HA Green. Shut down, unplugged the 1 TB SSD, held down the button and plugged the power back in. Waited until the LED was solid yellow, let go. LEDs blink rapidly for about 5-10 seconds then settle into a stable pattern of 2 yellow blinks and a pause. I let this sit for hours, and could not access homeassistant.local from the browser at all. HA Green is connected to the internet via ethernet, but no external traffic is going to or from the HA Green.

Ok… so I tried the recovery from microSD. I flashed the correct img to the microSD, inserted it and powered on the HA Green. Same sequence of rapidly blinking lights that settle into the 2 yellow blinks and pause routine. Again, let it sit for hours, no traffic going in our out.

I got the bright idea to wipe the SSD I had and install HA OS on that and plug that in to the HA Green and boot it back up. This almost worked! HA comes up via the browser, but I get the duplicate OS installation error that prevents me from doing anything.

2026-09-14 14:03:40.007 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.resolution.checks.duplicate_os_installation] Found duplicate OS installation: hassos-boot partition exists on 2 devices (/dev/sda1, /dev/mmcblk0p1)2026-09-14 14:03:40.007 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.resolution.checks.duplicate_os_installation] Found duplicate OS installation: hassos-boot partition exists on 2 devices (/dev/sda1, /dev/mmcblk0p1)

Ok, so this path is a dead end too. All along the way I’ve plugged in a monitor and keyboard to the HA Green and the monitor always says “no HDMI signal is coming from your device” so I can’t even get the console up.

Am I dead in the water? Is the OS on the eMMC corrupt, and is there any way to fix it that I haven’t tried yet? Do I just have a HA Green brick now?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hi @Mistofminn, long post I had the same issue with the backup I ended on beginning from a year old backup, so I know the feeling.

On your ssd issue, you probably need to remove one /boot partition so the rpi doesn’t think you have two startup drive.

Pretty sure it’s fixable

3

Following up on this as it’s been a few days. I haven’t entirely solved it, but I have more info.

First - not being able to access the terminal via a monitor was actually a monitor problem. Turns out my monitor HDMI port is broken, it won’t actually connect to any computer anymore. So I plugged the HA Green into the TV and viola I have the terminal.

Second - I believe the issue is a result of failure on the SSD. I was able to rename the hassos-data disk back (it had been renamed to hassos-data-old) and after doing that the HA Green is able to boot properly, albiet to a very outdated version of my setup before I switched over the disk to the SSD. I was able to get in and grab the encryption key (which is somehow different from what I had written down) so restoring is an option, but I think I’ll want to get a new SSD, or migrate to a mini PC at this point.

So just following up and letting everyone know that it was a hardware issue, and the hardware at fault was not the HA Green!