Install Home Assistant to Intel NUC m2 nvme ssd with previous windows partition. Ubuntu/Balena Etcher did not work

Installation
1

Spent around 2 hours trying to use Ubuntu Live with Balena Etcher to install the generic Intel img.
Balena kept throwing very unhelpful errors, and I tried multiple HAOS releases and versions of Etcher, and one other Live distro, just in case it was an incompatibility between the Linux / Etcher releases.
I was installing to used hardware that had a previous Windows 10 install, in preparation for restoring a backup. I’d previously done this for a move from a VM to an ODRIOD.

I have used the linux ‘dd’ command to write images to disks on Macs, so decided to try that approach. I found an article here : Migrate Home Assistant to Hass.io/HassOS/Intel NUC - Robert Andresen
, but his command line did not work as he was restoring a backup from a raspberry pi to a NUC, and the compression archive is different to the HA img.xz file.

What worked.

  1. Booted the NUC with an Ubuntu Live USB
  2. using Gparted on the Live USB, deleted the WIndows EFI partition on /dev/nvme0n1, formatted the drive to EXT4. You will need to identify what the device name of your disk is. An SSD would normally be /dev/sd_ where _ = a,b,c, etc.
    Also removed the ‘msft’ flag from the drive (this may have been unnecessary, but what the heck).
  3. The install instructions on home-assistant.io reference a file that is several releases behind, so visit:
    Releases · home-assistant/operating-system · GitHub to find the latest release from github. In my case it was https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/8.0.rc3/haos_generic-x86-64-8.0.rc3.img.xz
  4. Start a terminal session, and type the following on the command line:
xzcat ~/Downloads/haos_generic-x86-64-8.0.rc3.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/nvme0n1
  1. Note that xzcat is the equivalent of “xz --decompress --stdout”. It takes a bit of time to complete, but eventually will return to a command prompt.
  2. Log into the frontend in a browser, and restore a backup, rather than setting up a new user(in my case). Monitor the console until the restore had completed, reboot and away we go.
1 Like
2

Wow, thanks a lot for these great instructions! Worked for me like a charm on a Fujitsu FUTRO S740 with internal 16 GB M.2 SSD (it is found as /dev/sda instead of /dev/nvme0n1) I didn’t have to open up the case for installing HomeAssistant. These Thin Clients with Intel J4105, 8GB RAM and 16 GB M.2 SSD are available on ebay for about 60€. 16 GB SSD are enough for starting with home assistant. You may attach an external USB3 drive for storing data later.

Is it really neccesary to do the gparted stuff? I skipped this step because the dd command will overwrite the entire disk structure.

When dd has finished the command lsblk did list 8 sda partitions, so everything went well.

Before shutting down the live Ubuntu for rebooting into HAOS I issued a command for an additional EFI boot option:

sudo efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/sda --part 1 --label “HAOS” --loader “\EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi”

The PC did boot HAOS and installed the required components. After a few minutes Home Assistant was available in browser.

1 Like