HA-OS not able to boot a second time RPI4

Hi,

I’m writing this post to archive how I solved my problem with a fresh installation of HA OS on a Raspberry Pi 4. Installation done via the official Raspberry Pi disc imager tool.

The symptoms:

  • First boot and setup of HA worked fine
  • The Add-On store had surprisingly few Add-On’s available
  • I was not able to create a backup of HA
  • HA was not able to reboot after any form of restart, looking at the output with an HDMI screen the booting sequence stopped on “Wating for Home Assistant CLI to be ready”, and the web interface was not available. I let it sit overnight a few times as well, to see if time was a factor.:
    None of these ways of restarting worked:
    • Server restart (soft restart)
    • Host reboot
    • Host power-cycle (pull the plug and reboot)

I’m not very familiar with checking diagnosis over the terminal, but I attempted the following after “googling” for solutions and finding similar sounding issues both on this forum and on Reddit.

  • Check the clock, time was set correctly
  • I had internet access from the terminal, could ping Google
  • Could ping the host from another machine on the network, it had an IP address
  • “hassos-data” partition was named correctly, and e2label did not return any sensible result when attempting to run e2label /dev/sda8 “hassos-data”, as was suggested from one post that fixed a similar issue for many others.

What fixed it in the end for me, that I just stumbled upon, was installing HA-OS again on a different SD card. I can confirm the exact brands when I get home from work. But the successful one was a class 10 card from SanDisk.
Both cards were High-speed 64Gb class 10 SD cards.

What I find annoying, is that I am running Octoprint successfully on the same type of card that was not able to run HA. And I have had Raspbian running on the same type of card without issues.

Hope this post may help another frustrated soul that want to get Home Assistant up an running on a Raspberry Pi, it really is as easy as the internet says, when everything works…!

Just a thought, but maybe the cards you were having trouble with were faulty as opposed to the type of card being in compatible. When messing with raspberry’s over the years running various things on SD cards, I soon came to the conclusion that SD cards are not the most reliable of things, and can start to fail at a very early age. But I never came across a card that would not work, unless it was faulty.

I literally just installed this onto my RPi4. I am using a USB drive though. No issues rebooting, restarting, or pulling the plug and connecting again.

That might be the case, although the card that worked is actually older/used more than the one that failed.

Do you know of any tools that diagnose an SD card’s “health”?