Home Assistant Yellow installation

Via the NVMe > USB dongle I managed to removed the only partition. After moving the NVMe disk to my Yellow I was able to move the datadisk again.
I expected that after the move activity is completed a reboot would occur, after waiting for more than an hour I pulled the power plug and the yellow started.
The red and green led remain constantly on. The same experience occurs after updating the HAS OS update or a simple reboot from the GUI.
I’m still not convinced about the stability of the Yellow.

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Yeah - now you mention it, my Yellow (hass-data on SSD) still shows “Migrate datadisk” as an option!

Note, mine didn’t reboot after the successful datadisk move - rather an anticlimax, really.

That looks like a re-install from scratch, unless the “factory reset” button combo works. :frowning:

Without reading the RPi CM dev docs, I can’t be sure about boot order, but using dd if=/dev/zero to completely wipe the eMMC, installing the HASSOS image directly on the SD (via a USB dock), then booting from USB will probably work. The more unknown behaviour is where the HASSOS installer will choose to put the OS files - eMMC or SD?

The weird thing here is that unplugging the power will result in a normal boot, but a reboot from the OS will not.
Nevertheless, I will start from scratch again using Option 2: Reinstall Home Assistant OS using rpiboot en a clean NVMe disk.

Hi. I received my Yellow yesterday. I’m using a CM4 module, that already had HA OS installed. I had no luck trying to reset and install from a usb. The installation would fail, and I would try again, and again. Took me some hours :man_facepalming:. Then I ended up on this page on re-installing. I have a PiTray mini, that I used to load the Home Assistant OS Installer for Yellow directly to the eMMC with Raspberry Pi Imager, and lo and behold, the thing booted with the Yellow led flashing and all. Now you know. Good luck with yours!
And now everything is restored from backup and running.

I did a reinstall Option 2: Reinstall Home Assistant OS using rpiboot en a clean NVMe disk.
The installation went ok and I did not move the datadisk to the NVMe disk.
A reboot from the GUI still does not work, but after removing the NMVe from the device a reboot works fine. So this has something to do with the NVMe disk.

Is there anything special to do to make the USB ports work? I can’t get any USB stick (i.e. neither my Z-Wave stick nor a storage device) recognized by the kernel.

Solution: I had to edit config.txt on the HAOS boot partition to add dtoverlay=dwc2,dr_mode=host to the [pi4] section. Everything works fine now. Apparently, the CM4 disables its USB ports by default to conserve power.

Postscript: So of course I got the wrong image (i.e. the generic RPi4 one). Any way to flash the Yellow specific image from the command line or do I need to extract the NVME drive again?

I replaced the MVMe SSD with Samsung SSD980 and now all problems are gone even after moving the datadisk to the NVMe. The yellow still starts from the eMMC but that’s fine for me.

Same here. Order place and paid 17 Sept 2021, no shipping advice yet

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Fwiw I successfully installed a new Kingston NV2 M.2 500GBS NV2S/500G on the Yellow without any hiccups.

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Hi ! Mine was commanded on 12 june 2022 and will be received tomorrow.

Hi all,
A question, do you know if it is mandatory to install the “Home assistant OS Installer for yellow” ? Or is it possible to install raspbian OS lite on nvme SSD and use “Home assistant Container” via docker ?

My future config received tomorrow :

  • pi module 4 with eMMC
  • Yellow Kit power supply
  • SSD nvme M2 Samsung 980 (1TB)

thanks,

Yes - some reports suggest the RPi4 image doesn’t work fully on a Yellow as the specific HASS OS image includes additional hardware support (like status LEDs, SkyConnect 802.15.4 radio, NVMe SSD, etc).

I’d go further and say the whole point of getting a Yellow is to run HASS OS as an appliance, although it is really just a CM4 so RPi OS will run (and might be useful for some recovery tasks - more access to the bare metal such as to wipe a CM4 eMMC storage).

My Yellow runs fine with a 250GB Samsung SSD 980 NVMe M.2 ( installed via “Move datadisk” for the hass-data partition only). Links to migrations guides are above in this thread.

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You don’t need to use the installer, but it’s certainly better to use the custom Yellow image even though the generic Pi4 image can be made to work. You need to download it manually from GitHub as it is not in the list provided by Raspberry Pi Imager.

The Yellow image has been added to the Raspberry Pi Imager v1.7.3:

  • Operating system → Other specific-purpose OS → Home assistants and home automation → Home Assistant → Home Assistant OS Installed for Yellow

My Linux install shows the latest 2022105 release.

That’s only the Installer, not the actual OS image.

thank you for your replies, it has worked well for me. The only thing is for the moment, with a raspbian os I cannot use the zigbee module, and the led of my yellow is always red.

The red led is always on when the yellow is powered on, see Home Assistant Yellow Guide (home-assistant.io)

A 1TB SSD is not overkill in my opinion, looking towards the future. My 1TB is already using 20% including all backups. I however do everything with my Home Assistant instance. When there would be over-usage (wear leveling) of the SSD, I still will have 80% room left that can be used to store data unaffected by wear-leveling. It’s also not good to fill a SSD up till the maximum, so that keeps also some room available for when things go haywire (like logs going crazy)

I use a 256GB SSD which is now filled at 2%. I keep to the last 7 days backup on the Yellow locally.
Furthermore, I keep last 31 days backups on my remote NAS just to have offline (remote) backups in case the SSD is failing completely.

Am considering ordering a 1TB SSD and running a Plex server on the HA Yellow. Does anyone have any experience of this?