HAOS 18.0 on Raspberry Pi 4

Installation Home Assistant OS
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1

After upgrading to HAOS 18.0 on a Raspberry Pi 4 my Home Assistant appears to be broken. It will start and run for a while, but the UI is unresponsive after a couple of minutes. (The CPU gets very hot to the touch, but I don't know whether that is significant - I haven't been monitoring its temperature. This setup has run without problem during much hotter weather than we had yesterday.)

I note the warning in the release notes about a Pi 5, but I've got a Pi 4 so I'm not expecting that to be relevant.

Any suggestions as to how to debug and fix please?

If it helps, it's running from a SATA SSD connected via a magic cable to a USB port. I could presumably connect this disk to a PC and poke around the data on it if necessary.

2

I upgraded this morning on my Rasberry Pi 4 as well - the system attempt to boot but then the screen blanks and I see nothing - After waiting a while I do not think the supervisor or anything actually starts - since i cannot contact it. It makes it really difficult to figure out whats wrong since I have no video and no external connection. Flashing 17.3 seems to work just fine. A fresh flash of 18.0 also has the same problem for me. My storage is a local MicroSD card.

3

Now there is a note for the RPI too:

Note:
The default graphics (DRM) driver on Raspberry Pi 4 has been switched from the legacy, no longer maintained FKMS driver to the modern KMS driver, which among other things enables HDMI-CEC support. This only applies to new installations. On existing ones, config.txt in the boot partition must be adjusted manually to make the switch.

4

Did you guys also update CORE to 2026.6.4 ?, not that i know if that would help you, but it came after the OS update ( if i recall right )
If you don’t see the core update, run update through the cli

5

Interesting ... are there any instructions on how to do this?

And if I never connect a screen does it matter?

6

When I updated on my RBpi5 to 18.0 my matter/thread was broken.
Also everything was really sluggish.
I then installed 17.3 and put the backup back and all is good again.

Really weird.

Little scared to do the 18.0 update again..

7

I'm still searching how to do it.

8

It's not obvious to me how to revert to 17.3?

9

I had taken a backup prior to the upgrade to 18.0. In order to get it working again, I had to download 17.3 manually (https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/17.3/haos_rpi4-64-17.3.img.xz) and flash it to my MicroSSD manually (balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives). After it started up, I went to the web console and uploaded my backup.tar during the initial setup process.

It took ~60mins, so I don't really want to try this upgrade again.

10

I flashed the 17.3 img to a sd card, then from there put the backup from last night back.

11

I plugged my pi into a KVM, used the CLI to run ha core update, it said there was a process running, so I ran a ha core restart. That seemed to get HASS running, then while in the CLI I upgraded my pi's firmware since there was something in the release notes about making sure you updated your firmware using ha os boards raspberrypi firmware update

Rebooted a few times, everything seems to be working well now.

12

I'm running from a I TB SSD drive. I can try putting 17.3 onto that drive and then restoring from backup ... but that wipes the drive, and that system does partially work, and I could be left with nothing. I guess I can buy a new drive and use that (I don't have a spare). £160 ... I was expecting it to be worse than that with all the AI bollocks that's disrupting the supply chain. An alternative would be to stick the existing drive onto a PC and suck all the data off it for safe keeping. Hmm ... will think about it.

14

I had the same issue. So I first made an .img from the installation to my pc.. just in case.. so I could revert back if needed

15

SSH or plug in a monitor + keyboard, then run the following command ha os update --version 17.3

No restores or spare drives needed. You're welcome (source)

16

Yeah, my worry is that it only seems to stay up a couple of minutes after restart, so it might crash in the middle of that or any other process.

17

For what its worth; my Raspberry Pi 4 had firmware from 2020 when I attempted the upgrade. I recently upgraded to the latest firmware (May 2026).

I'm hesitant to try the upgrade again unless someone else can confirm it works. If I do, I'll probably take an image of my drive before so its easier to restore, and report back if it is still broken.

18

Boot it up in safe mode. Maybe some other integration is causing the issue & the OS update is a red herring.

(Also, what's a magic cable?)

19

In all honesty, I don’t think it is worth fighting too hard to run Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi if you are already hitting limits. You will probably have a much better long-term experience moving to a mini PC.

About a year ago I was in the same boat. I bought a Raspberry Pi, got excited about Home Assistant, then bought another Pi to run Dockploy for my own self-hosted apps. One of those Pis eventually burned out, and neither device ended up being enough for my current setup.

I eventually moved Home Assistant over to a Beelink N150 mini PC, and it has been a much better experience. Performance, reliability, storage, and general headroom are all noticeably better than what I had with the Pi setup. Take note a year ago things were cheaper less demand for home servers, ram, ssd ect. So skip over intermate level tech buy solid shit from the jump unless you want to waste money.

Now I am looking at one more upgrade, and this is the kind of “buy once, sip wine later” setup I would recommend to anyone who knows they are going to keep expanding their smart home or homelab even beyond the scopes of home assistant.

The Pi 5 is still great for low power use and basic Home Assistant setups. But once you start adding more integrations, add-ons, databases, cameras, backups, Docker containers, or other self-hosted services, a proper mini PC gives you a lot more breathing room.

Here are the three Minisforum options I would personally look at compared to a Raspberry Pi 5:

Device CPU RAM Net Performance Idle Consumtion Price
Raspberry Pi 5 4C / 4T 2.4GHz Up to 16GB 1GbE 1x 3 to 7W ~2.2 to 5.0 kWh $60 to $120
Minisforum MS-01 i9-13900H 14C / 20T Up to 64GB DDR5 2x10G + 2x2.5G ~8.3x 25 to 29W ~18 to 21 kWh $839+
Minisforum MS-A2 Ryzen 9 9955HX 16C / 32T Up to 96GB DDR5 2x10G + 2x2.5G ~17.1x 25 to 45W ~18 to 32 kWh $839+
Minisforum AI X1 Pro Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 12C / 24T Up to 96GB DDR5 2x2.5G + OCuLink ~10.7x 19 to 23W ~13.7 to 16.6 kWh $899+

Quick math (24/7 x 30 days):
Monthly kWh = (Watts × 720) ÷ 1000

Simple takeaway:
Pi 5 = lowest power, cheapest entry
MS-01 = best networking and expansion
MS-A2 = strongest overall buy once option
AI X1 Pro = best balance of power, efficiency, and modern features

20

I have no reason to believe I am "already hitting limits". Last time I looked I was using a tiny fraction of the capacity of the system - I haven't added orders of magnitude more load since then.

21

I don't know how to "boot it up in safe mode". I switch it on, it runs HA.