Homeassistant wont start, no SSH access

Installation
1

Hi,

I may have made a mess of my HA installation, and hope someone can save me from hours and hours of work. I was adding a second Homekit integration (as I was exceeding the 150 entity limit for the one I alread had), and to save time, I edited core.config_entities to split the entities between the two homekit bridges. Once done, I went to the developer section in the side panel and checked the configuration, got the ok, and restarted. And now it’s dead.

I can see that the machine is up and running, as I have a homebridge running in a Portainer stack, and can access that through its separate port. I can ping the IP address of the HA as well. The machine also responds when I try SSH root@ipaddress -p 22 - but I cannot get any farther. It will ask me for a password, and I’ve tried just hitting enter (as I read there is no root password), and I’ve tried the usual username/password combination I use for HA. Nothing works.

So I feel i’m kind of stuck. Does anyone have any idea of how to get it up and running again?
If not. I did make a backup a few days ago - how do i access it and restore it?

I appreciate any help. Thanks.

/Erik

2

The HA UI

Is this HAOS, docker or some linux install?

3

It is HAOS I believe. I ended up connecting a monitor and keyboard, and it boots to the HA CLI, and I managed to run HA core check, with “Command completed successfully” result (although it took 5 minutes).

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I was thinking I should try and edit the core.config_entries and try to fix whatever I did wrong (assuming that is actually the problem), and found my way to the correct path (/mnt/data/supervisor/homeassistant/.storage), but I have no way of editing the file from the command line (no nano, no way to install it, no samba acccess).

So I’m stuck again. Is there a way to edit the file?
Otherwise I assume I need to restore my backup from the CLI prompt.

4

An update: I managed to use ‘vi’ to edit the file, but did not resolve the issue. So I ended up restoring my full backup from a few days ago, and it has booted up nicely now and everything works.
A few learnings from my side (apart from not breaking stuff):

  1. Backups are invaluable! I pat myself on the back for remembering this one.
  2. I should have installed samba so I could have accessed files easier
  3. Have a micro-hdmi to hdmi adapter for your Raspberry Pi - without it I would have been stuck
  4. Maybe install a better command line editor (‘vi’ is not particularly user friendly, and copy/paste is not supported)

Thanks @tmjpugh for engaging.

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