Hi @tfe , coincidentally, I finally – mostly – recovered my installation last week. It was a NIGHTMARE. Here is what I ended up doing:
(Reminder that I’m running with a Raspberry PI CM5 that does NOT have integrated storage – which I think makes things much easier – so all of my storage is on a single NVMe.)
Please read to the end before following these steps, as there are some caveats!
- Pull the NVMe out and stick it into an enclosure.
- Connect the enclosure to a computer capable of reading it. I was not able to get this working on my Mac, because it is an EXT4 filesystem with several obscure flags set. (I found a commercial software package that claims to enable EXT4 on a Mac… but in the fine print it says that it cannot handle the flags that Home Assistant OS uses. I tried using a raspberry PI, but never successfully copied the data off of it because after ~10min of copying the drive would disconnect. (This happened with multiple different NVMe enclosures… it think the Pi is just not capable of consistently powering an NVMe for long sustained read/writes.) I finally asked a friend with a desktop linux computer to help me copy my data off… Ugh.)
- There should be a volume called something like “HASSOS Data”. Then inside it is a folder called “homeassistant”. Copy all of that. (Note: it’s possible you should copy some of the other folders there as well.) (See HERE and HERE for more…)
- Buy a second NVMe. (I did this so that I could retain the original as a backup… it would also be possible – though riskier – to just reuse the original NVMe.) Use an NVMe enclosure to connect it to my Mac and run the Raspberry PI imager. For OS choose “other specific-purpose OS”, then “home automation”, then “Home Assistant” then “Home Assistant OS 16.3 (Yellow)”.
- Reinstall the freshly-imaged NVMe in the HA Yellow. Start it up, create an account, get it up and running. Then shut down. [Note: I believe some of the files that you need to replace are created during first boot / onboarding flow; it didn’t work for me to skip this step. See HERE.]
- Remove the NVMe from the HA Yellow, put it back in the enclosure, and reconnect it to your computer. Replace everything that you copied in step #3 above.
- Re-install the NVMe and start up.
- Note that after completing these steps I was partially but not fully back up to speed. The 3 areas that still had problems were: 1. Z-wave JS UI, 2. ESPHome, 3. Missing Add-Ons. (Note I don’t extensively use HACS but I think that some things installed from there may need to be re-installed?)
- For Z-Wave, I thankfully had made a backup of my Z-Wave JS UI store. I went to Home Assistant>Settings>Add-ons and installed Z-Wave JS UI, then restored from my backup. It mostly seems to have worked (after a few restarts), though a few nodes are still missing.
- For ESPHome builder, I also re-installed the add-on. (Like Z-Wave JS UI, it was missing after step 8). My ESPHome devices miraculously reappeared. Whew!
- For the other missing add-ons (like terminal and file editor), I had to go re-install those, but that’s not a big deal.
Good luck!