That second grub install (using just sda) is the right one. If the install to /dev/sda1 didn’t damage anything, you should be able to boot now.
Otherwise, you might need to start from the top again.
@dbrand666 BTW you don’t even need to create a new partition. I’ve used the EFI boot partition (/dev/sda1) to install GRUB files there on APU2, worked like a charm.
- Boot APU into some Linux live USB (I’ve used SysrescueCD)
-
ddthe HAOS image to APU’s internal SSD (or from where you boot it),/dev/sdain my case
xzcat haos_generic-x86-64-9.4.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sda bs=1m - Mount
/dev/sda1(EFI boot partition) to/mnt
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot --force /dev/sda
Then just create a /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg with the following content:
set root=(hd0,gpt1)
configfile (hd0,gpt1)/efi/boot/grub.cfg
- Unmount
/mnt, take bootable USB out and reboot - Done, HAOS booting
@blind-oracle I specifically didn’t want to touch any of the partitions “owned” by HassIO just in case it decides to mess with them during an upgrade. I agree it’s pretty unlikely though and worst case you’d just need to reinstall GRUB.
@dbrand666 Yeah, I agree. But sda1 is just dumb standard EFI FAT32 which has EFI GRUB stuff inside which probably never gets updated (and even if it does we don’t care since we install in other folder). So, probably it should work fine. Time will tell 
It worked!!! Thank you @dbrand666, unfortunately now I am stuck in perpetual “Preparing Home Assistant.” In its long script at the end it reads: “23-01-23 18:06:06 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.homeassistant.core] Error on Home Assistant installation. Retry in 30sec”
BTW, this is my third installation of HAOS.
May go now to: Installing Home Assistant Supervised on Debian 11
Made a last-ditch effort with an operational and updated install of HA on an SSD of an UEFI x86-64 system. I applied your instructions from there and it’s working wonderfully
I think the problem was how the install of HA from github.com created very small partitions and giving an error of not enough space on the dev/sda8.
I am grateful for you help and hopefully the system will be stable – thanks again very much!
Not enough space on sda8? Any chance you put sda9 right after sda8 instead of telling gparted to place it all the way at the end of the drive?
Maybe @blind-oracle 's suggestion of installing GRUB right into sda1 is easier to follow. Sorry.
I did put sda9 right after sda8. I will try again with the other drive; but I need a bit more help understanding @blind-oracle instructions - thanks @dbrand666!
BTW sda8 used up all the rest of the space on the drive. I had to reduce its size to get the 10MBs to create the sda9 partition on the UEFI system that I used.
sda8 doesn’t get expanded until you boot for the first time. You should be able to create an sda9 at the end of the disk right after you copy the HassIO image to it. Make sure to say yes when gparted asks you whether to fix the disk
As for @blind-oracle 's instructions, just skip the part where I had you create the sda9 partition and mount the existing sda1 instead.
Thank you both @dbrand666 and @blind-oracle – its working great! This is how I did it (hoping it helps other newbies) with both your help:
Using Debian 11 Live I installed HAOS @ Terminal:
Logged in as root user
sudo su -
Downloaded and installed Home Assistant
curl -L https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/9.4/haos_generic-x86-64-9.4.img.xz |xz -d >/dev/sda
Mounted sda1
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
Installed grub2
sudo apt install grub2sudo grub-install --compress=xz --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda --force
Configured the grub.cfg file
cat <<! | sudo dd of=/mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfgset root=(hd0,gpt1)configfile (hd0,gpt1)/efi/boot/grub.cfg!
Unmount sda1
sudo umount /dev/sda1exit
Closed Terminal, shutdown pc, removed Debian 11 Live boot usb and restarted x86-64-bit system with a non-UEFI Legacy BIOS.
Thank you both, I could not have done it without your support – onward to Automation Creation!
Hi @carloshurtadom!
Your post is very useful for newbies. I have followed all your steps with some modifications:
- -force must be --force
- Before install grub 2 I must make an apt update (if not throws an error that grub2 doesn’t exists)
- unmount must be umount
I was able to install grub but HAOS doesn’t start and I don’t know the reason. I attach you a screenshot. It’ seems that there is no fail in any step, but I’m not sure. I hope you can help me. Thanks in advance
Saludos @zantos, thank you for your help; I made the typos corrections.
I am a newbie too and hope that others can help; @dbrand666 & @blind-oracle were very helpful to me.
Sorry I do not know enough to make any sense of your screenshot.
All the best
Thanks @carloshurtadom! Don’t worry, your guide was very very very useful for me.
@blind-oracle , nothing happens, the cursor blinks but HA never starts. I have tried installing a Debian and try to running Supervised install with hassinstall installation script and the process stops at “Start and initialize containers” step. I have connected trough SSH to check activity (screenshot attached).
What kind of hardware you’re installing it to?
Well then that’s what I suspected. It’s too old, it doesn’t support 64bit instructions, only 32bit. So Home Assistant OS won’t work there.
Hello,
I’m very grateful for finding this thread! I managed to install HAOS and get it booting from BIOS on an old laptop based on the instructions here.
Basically I used @matys.home 's instructions and method. Having very little experience about Linux, this required several attempts before I was successful.
The steps provided by @carloshurtadom is what I tried first but I don’t fully understand how those steps alone can work since installing the HAOS image will wipe the disk clean of everything else if I’m not mistaken? So I just ended up in the situation that when trying to install grub with sudo grub-install --compress=xz --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda --force then Debian was telling me that there is no BIOS boot partition on the disk which as far as I understand is correct after just having installed the HAOS image. Maybe I’m missing some point to be successful with this method?
But thanks for both anyway since there were useful points in both instructions.
What I did at the end:
- Had an SSD set up as GPT in the laptop
Booted to Debian Live 11 from USB
Installed HAOS image
curl -L https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/9.4/haos_generic-x86-64-9.4.img.xz |xz -d >/dev/sda
Installed gparted
sudo apt install gparted
Launched gparted from GUI which informed me that the partition table doesn’t include the whole disk and I let gparted fix it. This was crucial step at least for me for next steps because otherwise Debian installation to same disk was not possible as the full unallocated space left on the disk was not usable in the installation before the fix.
Launched Debian installation from the GUI in Debian Live 11.
In the installation process I created the necessary partitions to unallocated space on the disk ( /boot (~ 500MB), bios_grub (~ 8MB) and root (20GB)). This was not very easy even with graphical interface due to never having done this before in Linux. So the /boot is defined as “mounting point” and bios_grub is configured with the flag for the corresponding partition (was also wondering if “boot” flag is required for /boot but seems not needed). For root partition the mounting point had to be “/” and root flag enabled. The installer also automatically set the bios_grub flagged partition as 8MiB. After creating all 3 partitions then it will allow to continue the installation.
Booted to installed Debian and copied the grub.cfg contents from HAOS EFI system partition (so I mounted /dev/sda1 in my case and opened grub.cfg from there) to the grub.cfg in /boot/grub/grub.cfg. This step will also need that you allow read/write access for /boot/grub/grub.cfg
In the above steps when creating the partitions, I also made a mistake which I realized afterwards. So I created the partitions right after the HAOS partitions on the disk which caused the situation that HAOS was not able to utilize the free unallocated space (endless “Preparing Home Installation”). I used gparted in Debian Live USB to move the Debian partitions (all 3 of them) to the end of the disk space afterwards which I guess is risky but worked well in my case. After doing this HAOS was able to use the unallocated space available right after its’ own partitions.
After all of the above, the HAOS was available in the boot menu and can be launched.
I would be grateful for some detailed instuctions on how to set the HAOS as default boot system in Debian side? I was playing around with this but the only way I managed to change the default boot selection is when I added one of the HAOS menu entries as custom menu entry in /etc/grub.d which does not really work without the other content from grub.cfg in HAOS EFI partition.
Long reply but hope this maybe helps some other newbies such as myself
Greetings @sandman-125
Thank you for such a laborious explanation of what you did; I am sure many will benefit from you hard work. If I am understanding you correctly, (and I may have miscommunicated in my install description), but I never intended to install Debian 11 on my old pc (i.e., non UEFI BIOS). I only used Debian live to setup HAOS without installing it as per @dbrand666.
Thanks again,
PS. Sorry I cannot help with your partition question, but I was looking at this video (Install Home Assistant on Debian Linux - YouTube) before my current install.