Hassio booting off ssd on a Raspberry Pi 3b+

Empty SD card ( size of 2Gb) is still there, well at least in my case. I will test how it is without it later on.
Edited:
Tested a few times =>

  1. RPi does not boot (reboot) without empty SD card inserted.
  2. After short (a few secs only) power cut it does not reboot
  3. After long (from approx 20 secs up) power cut it reboots normally
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On the step where entering line…

# curl -sL 
 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/hassio-installer/master/hassio_install.sh
  | bash -s -- -m raspberrypi3

… I get message…

[Error] Please install jq first

Please advise on what I need to do to get past this.

Sory new to this… Installed using

sudo apt-get install jq

Doh!

Thanks for this tip - I had a power failure yesterday after 2 month running of SSD and my system would just not boot anymore.
Until that power failure, it always worked perfectly fine without any SD card and would boot straight of the SSD. For some reason it does not anymore.

I tried the bootcode.bin and timeout methods, but nothing happened. The empty SD card did the trick, it started booting of the SSD again.
Need to get some sensors on ZIGBEE back up and running now.

Now start the Hassio installation (the following is one long command… line wrapping happens) >
# curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/hassio-installer/master/hassio_install.sh | bash -s -- -m raspberrypi3

When attempting to execute the above, I get error

bash: line 1: 404:: command not found

Can someone please help? Thanks

That script is designed to install Home Assistant on a computer (in your case, a Raspberry Pi 3) with an existing linux operating system. That type of installation is known as Home Assistant Supervised.

Two weeks ago, there was a blog post announcing Home Assistant Supervised would be deprecated immediately. However, the community objected to it and the decision has been placed on hold, for further review. However, the documentation has been purged of references to Home Assistant Supervised and installation scripts have been removed. It explains why your attempt to use it resulted in a 404 message (i.e. not found).

An archived version of the installer script is available here:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/supervised-installer/c674830d8ddc6af9d618755a7995af939dd73fde/installer.sh

Thanks Taras. It’d be a real shame to lose this Home Assistant Supervised as it’s the only option that completely fulfills my requirements for using a RPi3B+. i.e.

  1. Allows me to boot from a Raspbian Lite USB
  2. Setup a static IP
  3. Setup WiFi
  4. Provides me with Supervisor control.

All the other installation options fall short in one way or another. My vote is to retain this option.
Thanks again…

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You’re welcome and you’re not alone in appreciating the advantages of Home Assistant Supervised. The development team did not have a comprehensive view of how many people use it. When it came time to lighten one member’s workload, they decided to end support for Supervised. It was only then, based on community feedback, did they learn that it was a valued installation method.

To gain better insight, version 0.110 now reports the precise ‘flavor’ of Home Assistant (see Developer Tools > Info) and reports it back as telemetry via the updater integration. Updater is enabled by default (it’s included in the default_config option).

I fully agree, as I also failed to install HA supervised, showing up this 404 error. Very bad!
Just started to run HA to replace my pimatic installation or run it next to it. Without this option, HA is a dead horse for me, as I like to have full control of my pi and it’s OS.
Please think about better options.

Best regards
Stefan

Hi all,

I’ve been running HA on an SSD since discovering this and a few other threads back in 2019. It’s been working great. Even survided a few power outages. Read that upgrading the Supervisor past 3.7 will cause booting from SSD to no longer work.

Has anyone upgraded past that point? I’m concerned about falling to far behind. I can’t go back to an SD card as I had too many failures. I guess I would need to do VM but I have several USB conencted dongles (ZWave, Wyze etc …) which make VM’s more challenging to setup.

BTW I’m using Kingston SSD with the StarTech adapter.

where did you found this information??? I’m running on a ssd for some weeks now and in the last days i got serious thermal problems and i’ve no idea why

Hi Yakman,

Well I’ve been running on SSD for a few months and always kept my system up to date. This morning I got a power outage and there we are, it is not booting anymore. So indeed I would hold on updating to the current version.
Right now my system is out and I don’t know what to do about it. I did not know that the latest supervisor would break the SSD boot. This I actually don’t understand as many must be running this configuration.
My house is now crippled 1 week away from vacation.

I was running Hassio 0.111.1 on a Raspberry Pi 3B with Sandisk SSD 128 GB. I even tried reboots in the past and all worked, so I thought it was settled.

Does anyone know how I could read the Hassio SSD to get the latest backup to an SD card?
Or any tips on getting the boot on SSD to happen? I was using an empty SD card or it would not work.

I think booting directly to USB on the Pi3 was a one way process, i.e. once done it will never boot from an SD Card - precisely why I never understood why anyone would! You could try a fresh RaspberryOS image and see if it boots.

If you have a Pi or Linux machine, it is highly likely you will be able to mount the SSD and read the data off it.

I recommend the Backup to GoogleDrive addon, but that advice is a bit late…

Thanks for the advice.

I’ve inserted my previous SD card install and it booted correctly from there. So I have an old version of HASSIO running now, with missing devices.

I’ll try to mount the SSD on my PC and see if I can recover the snapshot. GoogleDrive is a good point, as soon as I get things running I need to look into it.

So I managed to mount my SSD on my PC and recovered the latest snapshot file.

I then transferred it to my running instance which uses the SD card and made a “Wipe and Restore” which worked beautifully. Everything is back, even the DECONZ configuration and Node Red flows.

The system still shows OS V3.12 - I clicked on the update button and it then downloaded and rebooted. After restart, the OS is still at v3.12. I can’t see why it does not update to 4.1 and was not able to trace anything in the logs. I cleared browser cache and still no updated OS. Any ideas? Where should I look to find out the issue?

Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
Supervisor Version: 227
Home Assistant: 0.111.4
Hassos 3.12

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Glad to hear you got it up an running

I have rebooted my Pi a few times and have also survived a few power outages while booting from SSD . This used to work with the older versions of the supervisor. I am version 3.7. I believe what you are describing only booting once is true now for the newer versions of the supervisor.

I moved to SSD as my SD cards were lasting only a few months and would never survive a power outage. I also have a small UPS for my Pi and have worked to keep my DB smaller. I’m thinking of moving away from the Pi and going to Proxmox once I can get my hands on an older laptop or PC to set that up on.

I also agree with your recommendation on the Google Drive backup. Its easy to setup and use.

Do you use an SD card for the boot partition? On a Pi3 you could Bypass the SD card completely - that was what I referred to - doing so was a one time thing on the Pi and cannot be undone. Personally I just have the boot partition on a really small SD card with rootfs on the SSD.

No, the system was booting directly on the SSD. I had the system booting without SD card for some time. It all worked well but then one day, after another power cut, it just did not boot anymore.
After some research, I tried a couple of setup with the timeout file on the SD which never worked. Someone suggested the empty SD card and it worked (I don’t know why though). I tried again without and it would not boot. So I left the empty SD card inside until last week (after multiple updates on OS and home assistant in the mean time) where booting from the SSD just stopper working again, with or without SD card inserted.

Right now I am back to run the whole setup on from another SD card I had spare. I was not able to get the system to boot from the SSD again.
The SD card is also stuck with OS 3.12. I can’t trace why it does not install 4.1.

How did you get the boot partition on the SD only to then boot the system on the SSD?

That is not correct. Once the boot from USB flag is set you can boot from either the SD card or USB.

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