Help - HAOS installing onto the usb stick it’s booting from

Installation
1

I downloaded the HAOS boot image and used Rufus to make a bootable usb stick.
Booted an Azulle PC into it and it runs the install completely unattended, never asking me anything. But it appears to install onto the USB stick itself, not onto the internal hard drive. I suspect this because as soon as I pull out the USB stick it stops functioning, and then when I restart the computer it boot back into Windows.

Does anyone know how I can correct this? Are they config files on the image when I build it that I need to adjust?

2

Sounds like you flashed HAOS onto the USB disk. HAOS has no installer. You are supposed to flash and boot the stick with a live linux system from which you can then then flash HAOS onto the internal disk. There’s also other ways to go about this but see docs.

3

You can’t create install media like you do with windows. You just flashed a working copy of Home assistant OS to the USB drive. You didn’t get any messages because all it was doing was setting up HA for first use in the USB. Windows still boots because nothing changed on that drive at all.

You need to flash the HAOS to the internal drive using one of the methods provided in the previous post.

4

The HAOS generic x86-64 image is not a traditional installer - it is a disk image that must be written directly to your target boot drive (the internal SSD/HDD). When you flashed it to the USB stick with Rufus, you made the USB the boot medium, not an install wizard, so HAOS boots and lives on that stick.

The correct approach for an x86 machine where you can’t remove the internal disk:

  1. Use Rufus to write an **Ubuntu Desktop** ISO to the USB stick instead.
  2. Boot the Azulle into Ubuntu (live session, no install needed).
  3. In Ubuntu, open the **Disks** app, select the internal drive, choose **Restore Disk Image** from the three-dot menu, and point it at the downloaded `haos_generic-x86-64-xx.img.xz`.
  4. Remove the USB, reboot, and HA will come up on the internal drive.

Alternatively, the **HAOS USB Creator** tool (search the HA community forum) wraps this into a guided installer that writes to the correct disk.

5

I had this exact issue with my new install in February. I stumbled through it with “help” from ChatGPT,.

I ended up having to take the SSD out of my Chromebox and get a USB enclosure to do it from another computer. I used balenaEtcher and etched “the Home Assistant OS image for Generic x86-64” onto it.

I’m far from an expert in this type of thing but it was fairly straightforward.

I threw it back in the Chromebox and it hung a little bit, but restarted it and it’s been working fine ever since then.