HAOS 13.1 upgrade. unable to boot (RPI)

I’m on a 2gb pi4 and I’m hitting this - people with 4gb pi4’s also report it. And yet many others work. It’s a strange one.

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I don’t think that’s correct, as several Pi4 users also have the problem.

Moreover, it’s not acceptable that supported hardware can simply become unusable after an update, without any prior warning. I’m just a user of HA and have no idea what could cause it to fail in this way. I think many people might be discouraged from using this fantastic system when something like this happens.

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After updating to HA OS 3.1 yesterday, my Pi3 started rebooting constantly. I used your tip about using the old boot slot with the command “ha os boot-slot other”

This worked fine, and I was able to use my HA again, and the version number was back to 3.0.

Today, I restarted HA OS, and now it has started rebooting again, and this time it’s running 3.0. Have you tried restarting, and do you have any idea what I can do to get my installation working again?

Yeah, if a Pi4 with 2gb of ram is hitting this, there’s more to it than just the lack of resources

The RPi4 with low memory might also see this issue.
And it happens all the time in the world of IT.
You might get a RPi3 to run, but the after the update the OS require more resources, so you need to discard some of your integrations/addons to free some up.

This happens for Windows, MacOS, Linux and any other software that are kept up-to-date or evolve to new versions.

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Just an update from my end, I tried removing my ‘Zigbee CC2531’ from the USB port and then started HA OS 13.0. HA OS started up without any issues, and everything except my ZigBee devices worked as it should. I then tried plugging the ‘Zigbee CC2531’ dongle back in while the system was on, and shortly after, all my devices came ‘Online’ and everything seems to be working again! It seems like HA OS 3.x can’t fully boot up and starts rebooting when the dongle is plugged in. This has never been a problem in the last 2-3 years. There must be a bug somewhere in 3.x…

I don’t think this is due to a lack of resources from the Pi3.

If Home Assistant OS no longer works on the Pi3B, which I don’t think is the intention, then it shouldn’t be on the list as an option on the website:

I think you have missed some numbers. Do you mean that your two slots have 13.0 and 13.1 in them? If so, both of those can exhibit the problem. You might need to force a fallback to 12.4, which you can do with “ha os update --version 12.4” (note the double minus sign on --version). What does “ha os info” say that you currently have in each slot?

As for getting yours to boot, I think it’s more complicated. First time I hit it I had to fetch the pi from where it lives on top of a cupboard and plug in a screen to see what it was doing. So my zigbee dongle wasn’t plugged in when I was doing that, but it was still failing to boot.

I managed to get mine to boot on 13.1 yesterday by setting some addons to not start automatically at boot, and then started them manually when it was up, but it still crashed/rebooted after about half an hour.

I wouldn’t call a 4gb Pi “low memory”. And “other stuff” might stop working on older hardware after a major new version but it doesn’t do it without warning, or explanation as to why.

Yes, I was running 13.0 until I updated to 13.1. So I have the option between 13.0 and 13.1. Right now, the system is running on 13.0 without any problems after I removed my dongle and reinserted it after boot. I will try to disable my Zigbee2MQTT Add-on, maybe that will be enough for it to restart with the dongle inserted.

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If you click the View tutorial button, then you will get this in the beginning of the next page.

Exactly, it says that a Pi3B is okay, but a Pi3A has too little RAM (500 MB).

It says it is okay to get started, which implies it can’t handle bigger setups.

I have a small setup… Let’s agree to disagree :wink:

I have a RPi 3B with 1GB RAM as backup. It took two tries to successfully load HAOS 13.1. Checking RAM utilization with System > Hardware, nearly 800KB was in use following installation. With a several add-ons installed, it’s time for me to move to a more-capable RPi.

My Pi 3 B uses 0.6 GB (small setup). As it did on 2.4.

The ram usage will normally spike during boot up and that is where it is critical to have enough of it.

This isn’t the problem. 4gb Pi4 systems are hitting this reboot problem.

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I am running a Homeassistant test system on a Pi4B-2GB with a few integrations and add-ons. So far I haven’t had any problems updating the OS. The last updates from 12.4 → 13.0 → 13.1 went through without any problems. The average memory utilization determined via SystemMonitor is around 50%. The OS is installed on an SSD, the utilization is about 3%.

It’s not just some Rpi 3B and Rpi 4 that are having issues; some mention that they are experiencing problems with HA Blue and Generic X86-64 look here: