I posted this on Discord, but no reply yet, so I thought this too would be a good place to ask and for others to find information about this…
Ok… now I’ve been using my new Home Assistant Blue for a short time after migrating from a Pi4 and I find myself wondering where are the directions on how to fully restore a crashed, failing to boot, HA Blue? Something for new people that have never used an ODROID-N2+, especially one in such a nice case…
So I find, https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/ which of course says. “If you are using the Home Assistant Blue, the Home Assistant Operating System is already preinstalled. You can skip this installation step.”… Not if your Blue refuses to boot because some idiot screwed something up… ok that may be me in the future… When I’ve done this before on the Pi4 I just pull the SD card and start over.
It’s just a matter of time before I poke around in a file I should not be in or in someway truly lockup my Blue so I want to be prepared for a quick recovery…
Not if it hard crashes like mine just did last night. If you or an integration does something to the installed HA that stops it from booting / starting… well then… you won’t get anything… its dead…
I have been having stability issues with the Google Nest integration having to be reconnected to my account and reauthorized after some time. Typical symptoms are my cameras fail to load. This time I went to the Integrations panel, opened the Google Nest intagration, opened the three dot menu and choose the “update” option. That did not work, so I figured I would “restart” HA. Well… Nothing… its dead, will not boot / start… I have a really nice looking paper weight…
The worst fact is that I have been using Shelly units for my outdoor lighting and I unattached the physical switch from the units so I could use them to disable automations etc. That means without HA running, my family cannot turn on or off the outdoor lights manually… Have to rethink this…
Anyway… that is why there should be detailed instructions on how to restore the Blue units to factory image… I was told that the last link is especially important that shows how to get access to the internal memory to burn on the new image…
Now I know why my mind found it necessary to buy two (2) HA Blues… I just plugged in my second unit and with luck I’ll be able to restore a backup and be up an running shortly to it while I take my dead unit and reimage it so it will be ready when this one eventually crashes…
So yes, your statement is correct for a Blue our of the box, but not so true if HA decides to not boot/restart after we have been adding integrations etc. and one of them has issues…
It worked… I was able to flash the unit with a new image and start it up. Went ahead and logged in and then downloaded and installed the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup add-on. Then I shutdown the unit and boxed it as my ready to go hot swap… Now to work on my own set of instructions that bring it all together and hopefully, if needed, one of my kids, alright their adults, can follow the directions is I’m not there to bring it up…
Could you define which steps you took? Ik trying to reflash mine with a SDcard according to the ODROID - Home Assistant default instructions.
steps I did are:
flashed microsd card.
unplugged blue
remove screws
inserted sd card.
attached network cable
attached power cable…
waiting few minutes… :-S
tried accesing homeassistant.local:8123 internal IP adres
removed ip adres reservations on router…
retried unplugging power en plugging in again…
at the moment trying now these steps…
This seems to be working… nice. new preparing screen is also awesome…
Did you finish documenting how to restore the Blue? I went thru a major overhaul of my dashboards and I would like to start with a fresh install and restore of my configuration.
I’ve ordered a second Blue as a backup, but it will not arrive for some time.
i’m curious too. I was really in love with the Blue until I realized they are useless when they have an issue that you need to access the physical host OS. Mine had an issue with the date/time getting blasted way into the future and there seems to be no way to fix it. I bought it because I thought it would keep me on a better supported hardware path that my pi or my ubuntu docker image. I’ve been struggling with getting private keys setup so I can ssh to the host to set the stupid date. This is the opposite of what I thought this hardware option would be.
Wanted to post a reply because I just got thru this issue. I am a Home Assistant Blue owner, and had an incomplete setup at my OLD house. Moved to a new place and I just wanted a bone stock Home Assistant install on my Blue, like the day it first arrived. I think I’ve figured that out in a few easy steps:
Install Terminal/SSH add-on. Edit that add-on and enter the terminal.
type ‘rm -r config’ to remove the /root/config directory. It might say you can’t delete the directory because its in use, but if you go into the directory you’ll see theres NO files remaining.
Reboot the HA Blue - you’ll have to enter your IP:8123 fresh, because your old links won’t work - but once you connect you’ll go thru the STOCK onboarding process with a clean/STOCK install.
One more thing:
I didn’t do this, but you could also delete the backups… or, keep them in case you want to revert. I believe they are in /root/backups.
i have an odroid n2+ wich also had an “hard crash” and now trying to reinstall home assistant from scratch it wont work… seems like i need to reset it to like it was when i bought it… but no luck…
did you succed?
Funny thing, I bought my HA Blue because it was a good looking case and I thought it may be collectable in 50 years. I will be 122 years old then. Maybe my heirs will find them and make a lot of money on the collection,
