You’re right. However, berating an end user who complains about lack of QA on a voluntary project (which they can absolutely contribute to and revert to the “stable” branch in case of issues) is.
Home Assistant is no longer solely a voluntary project. Nabu Casa employs folks around the world, and they manufacture and sell hardware and software services. Yes, there is still a large user base that contributes to the platform voluntarily. However, when a company sells hardware like the HA Yellow, HA Green, the voice assistant, Zigbee and Z-Wave radios, etc, there comes a time when the expectations for quality control are elevated compared to when the system truly was voluntary.
Anyway, we’re definitely off-topic. Do you have any suggestions that might help @mike15 recover his system? He has tried reverting to a previous version, however his system is inaccessible after the HAOS 16.0 upgrade.
Definitely worth trying @ogiewon’s suggestion. Repeat Step 2 up to the point where you can begin the initial setup, then skip to Step 3 where you attempt to copy the files over using your Pi. See if it takes the 20Gb file then.
Yep, I do.
Assuming the boot slot with 16.0 was marked as bad, it should fall back to the 15.2 boot slot after 3 (or 5, not sure) unsuccessful reboots. It’ll be hard to verify without a screen or a serial connection, but worth a shot.
Secondly, a 20gb config file doesn’t sound right. Try to open it up (install Linux on your spare pi if you have to) and see why it’s so huge
Yesterday when in updated my yellow with cm4 from 16.0 to 16.1
I thought I ran into the same issue.
But it turned out duckdns wasn’t working well.
It took me a few hours and most is working except from a valid certificate.
Let’s encrypt now tells me 429. So I have to wait until tomorrow.
@mike15 - While I know the following does not help resolve the issue you’re still facing, I thought it worth adding to the discussion.
When HAOS 16.0 originally came out, I saw this thread and decided to hold off on upgrading from HAOS 15.2 for a while. HAOS 16.1 was recently released, and again I held off for a little while. This morning, I decided to take a chance. I created a manual unencrypted backup for safekeeping and then upgraded my HA Yellow PoE (CM5 booting directly off of NVME drive) from HAOS 15.2 to 16.1. It went smoothly and everything appears to be working fine. I have seen other posts where the onboard Zigbee radio was an issue post upgrade. I am running Zigbee2MQTT using the onboard Zigbee radio, and everything is still working fine here.
I hope you are able to get your system sorted out soon!
Thanks for looking into this! I ran the Raspberry Pi imager on NVMe in a USB enclosure, then installed the NVMe in the HA Yellow and booted. I went through the initial setup (create an account, choose timezone, etc.), then shutdown, removed the NVMe from the HA Yellow then put it back into the USB enclosure, then plugged it into the RPi…
(I found that the directory structure coming straight out of the RPi imager was wildly different from that of my old NVMe, so I didn’t think it made sense to just copy configuration files in that state. Putting the NVMe into the HA Yellow and running the first boot initial setup flow changed that…)
Good morning all,
Im running HA on Rpi 5 with 1gb SSD in an argon neo case.
Currently on 15.2 i’ve tried 16.0 16.1 and yesterday 16.2. Nevertheless on all 16’s home assistant freezes after a while. Is anyone else still having these type of issues?
Hi all,
same here!
Issue is only on my HA slave, running on Rpi3b (just for Zigbee2MQTT and Homematic in the ground floor).
OS 16.2 is working fine on my HA master, running on VM at my QNAP NAS in 19’’ rack in the basement.
BTW:
Best+fastest way for me to repair/downgrade is to just ssh into the Rpi (right after the start, before it becomes unavailable) and switch the boot slot: Common tasks - Operating System - Home Assistant
I’m certainly not denying there may be a problem with HAOS, but an Rpi3 has only half of the minimum memory requirement for HAOS. Let alone if you install addons. So there is a good chance this is either another problem or even worse: compound problems. I would advise upgrading the Rpi to a 4 with at least 2GB. It would not solve any HAOS problems, but the other way around: if the OP’s problems are worked out, you still could have problems. Memory use tends to grow with each update as functionality gets added.
True. I’m certainly considering this since a while (but esp the USB3/2.4 GHz interference topic made me hesitate).
However, as this whole thread shows, there are lots of people facing issues with OS 16.x, even on way more powerful HW.
Can anybody confirm that the Boot issue with 16.x HA OS has been solved on the HA Yellow ? So by confirming, that means shat 16.0 had the issue, but 16.2 doesn’t. I have beta tested the 16.0, 16.1 and both did fail at upgrade (I had to manually install the OS again on the external NVME.).
Still having this issue with 16.3 had to reinstall 15.2
@mike15 Were you ever able to recover your original installation? I’ve got the exact same hardware and am having the exact same problem, including being unable to connect to the console. I’m going to buy an M.2 enclosure tomorrow to try reading the SSD but I expect I’ll have the same problem as you with the encryption key. In any case, where did you eventually land with your issue?
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!
Glad to hear you were finally able to get your system back up and running!
Good morning all,
I was wondering if there are any updates on the subject here. I must admit I have not taken any action like described by some here other than reverting back to 15.2 which is entirely stable. I am also not daring enough to add my main instance to the beta channel. Nevertheless I would like to get HA back to a current OS. Meaning I tried updating to HAOS 17 yesterday but HA froze after some time. (less than an hour)
As the spouse is out today was planning to mess around with HA but figured before that I’d ask what the actual issue is.
I am running HA on a:
RPi 5
Argon NEO
1 GB SSD.
core 2026.1.2
superviser 2026.01.1
operating system 15.2
frontend 20260107.2
Open to suggestions
@330chauf I can’t say whether the issue that killed my Yellow is fixed or not. Just that there is a path to restoring under the right circumstances.
FWIW, I haven’t had any OS related issues since (though I’m not rushing to upgrade to v17!), and all of the comments I’ve read suggest that whatever happened to me (and others!) was a bug in the upgrade process. So once you’ve upgraded to 16, it seems like you’re out of the woods on this particular issue.
good luck!