Odroid-xu4 HA image not booting

Installation
1

Hi,

I tried HA by running it as a VM on my laptop, and want to have it running permanently now on my Odroid-XU4, but the HA image I downloaded does not boot. (I flashed the image on the emcc memory card)
https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/4.13/hassos_odroid-xu4-4.13.img.gz
I had this same problem with an older version of the HA Odroid image, I never got it to boot.
To verify that the problem is not on the Odroid, I downloaded and flashed a Ubuntu image from the Odroid site, and that one booted without any problems.
Also, when I put the emcc memory card in my laptop, it mounts, and I can see its contents.

Can someone help to get HA running on my Odroid ?
I took the Odroid, because it is supposed to be faster than the pi3 and the emcc memory is supposed to be much more reliable than normal flash memory.

2

Hi there, did anyone get back to you on this?

I have an Odroid C2 which was running fine on 4.x which after upgrading to 5.x stopped working.
I tried flashing the eMMC with a fresh 5.9 and 5.8 and it wouldn’t boot, however it works fine on a SD card. I then tried a fresh 4.x on the eMMC and this works fine.

3

Your question comes just in time.
Yesterday, I did some additional googling, and I found some instructions to boot from emcc, and it worked, my xu4 is running for about 24h on emcc now.
To do the commands, I connected a USB keyboard and a HDMI TV to the xu4 device
After startup, I logged in using root as login without password, this brings you to the ha command line, and then go to the linux command line by typing login.

This is what i did to make it work:
Based on this link, and using the latest xu4 image file.
https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=96&t=34241

    flash HassOS to both an SD and eMMC, 
    then boot off the SD with the eMMC also plugged in, then run
    dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 of=/dev/mmcblk0boot0 bs=512 skip=1 seek=0 count=16381
    at the Linux prompt. 
    At first dd was not able to copy the bootsector because the emmc memory was read only,
    to make it writeable:     echo 0 > /sys/block/mmcblk0boot0/force_ro
    to re-enable after running dd: echo 1 > /sys/block/mmcblk0boot0/force_ro
    shutdown, poweroff and remove the SD card.
    Power the xu4 again, and it now boots from emcc.

I changed the IP@ of my Home Assistant VM, and will keep it around to test new things before I put them on the xu4.

4

Seems like a painful process.
I think I’ll wait for a bit and see if they fix the problem in version 6.x

5

Not painfull at all, just copy/paste the 2 commands,
to copy the bootsector from the SD card to the emcc card.
It only takes a few seconds.
And if it does not work for you, you can always wait for the next version.

The hardest part was to find this procedure.

6

Actually, I think that only works for XU4 devices. C2s don’t have a boot sector like the XU4.
I think the problem here is a different one.

7

As I don’t have a C2 device, I cannot test it, but when I look at the odroid website, I see that the C2 also has SD and emmc slots, but instead of a manual switch, there seems to be a process in firmware that automatically chooses sd or emmc to boot.
But you will still need a bootsector to be able to boot.

So why not just test it, if it fails, you can always reflash your emmc card if something goes wrong.

8

Exactly this two lines didn’t help, but this docks does

Hope it would help someone