Installing HA from a USB flash drive onto an empty MiniPC

I have started HA on the MiniPC with a USB Flash drive.
It is running now.
Is there a way to install HA on the empty SSD drive on my MiniPC?

This is almost exactly what the docs are for :slight_smile:

If you don't bother reading the docs you will come across all kinds of issues, read the docs before watching online guides as HA changes so often most guides over 6 months old are out of date.

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I read the docs all right. But then I get stuck on the way how to get the HA installation on the MiniPC.
I moved it to the hard drive of the MiniPC, but it won't boot from the MiniPC.
It still needs the USB flash drive to boot.

If you really read it you would have realised this is the section you need to follow.

Method 1: Installing HAOS via Ubuntu booting from a USB flash drive

I did this last week and scrupulously followed the instructions. It can be confusing and I read it several times, printed it out and read it again, before doing it. I am not very technical. It worked.

Booting with ubuntu doesn't get the system started properly. I have tried this with all possible settings in the Bios. The system boots and then I choose Try Ubuntu. It ends up with a black screen. So I have been looking for a way to get a bootable Home Assistant on my system without using Ubuntu.
So this has nothing to do with not reading the manuals.

Unless your mini pc has a hardware issue, it should work. I used Ubuntu (from a flash drive) as well and believe me I am not very technical.

To write Home Asitant OS on the computers internal drive, you will need to understand a little baout Linux. The pprocedure is to boot Linx off some USB drive then copy the HOme Assitant image from another USB to the system internal drive using something like the “dd” command. dd does a bit-by-bit copy and does not know aboiut partitions or files. It just clodes the drive.

The above works but I don’t like the result. I much prefer to run HA on Proxmox. Thsi adds a thin layer between the bare NUC hardward and HAOS and makes runing everything easy and browser based. backups and especailly restore after crash is easy. After install you remove the keyboiard and monitor and place the NUC in a closet.

The trick is to read the instructions until you understand them, then put the instructions away and “just do it”. If you need to instructs open while you work then you are “doing magic”.

All you need to do is make a bit-for-bit copy of the HAOS install image to the system’s internal drive.

I might ask how you were able to make a bootable USB drive. You could likely use that same method to create a bootable internal drive. At least conceptually, the process is the same: copy the bit from a downloaded file to a bootable storage device.

As said above, I don’t like doing this because homes have a LONG lifespan, perhaps many decades. The house will outlive the computer, so you will have to do this many times as you replace the hardware over the next 50+ years. I prefer a virtual computer that is just a live image file so that moving it to different hardware is easy or can even be automatic. I don’t like the idea of tying the HAOS to physical hardware so tightly. So-called “bare metal hypervisors” provide a kind of decoupling and have no noticeable performance hit.

Did you follow the efibootmgr steps?

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I do see the advantages of installing HA on Proxmox. However, I did some research and some knowledge of Linux systems is necesary. I am not quit familiar with administrating a Linux system. So I decided to install HA directly.
In the meantime I resolved the problem of Ubuntu not starting on my system, I used Mint instead.
Everything works like a charm now... :slight_smile:

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