Posting here as a touchpoint for anyone else in a similar boat.
After a power-cord-pull on the Pi (I know ), the system won’t update.
It will restart just fine … just, neither “core” nor ÖS will complete on their updates.
Second symptom: the home_assistant_v2 db grows from 1.5 to 13Gb in size.
I’ve tried all the advice I can find:
restart and try again
power off via menu and try again
connect to SSL CLI and do a ha core update
plug directly into the pi and do a core update
IMO the update is causing the growth to 13Gb; it takes WAY longer than the normal 10-15 minutes (we’re talking 4-8 hours. Overnight) before the update “completes”. I’ve tried wiping the db and letting HA recreate. That didn’t work - it grew back to 13GB in short order (which is suspicious, that it’s the same size that it grew back to. Can’t be chance …)
Third symptom (love an explanation, this one’s WAF): anything new installed (looking at Samba here, as I needed to get much closer to the filesystem) dissapears after the not-updated-8-hours. Samba installed fine. Survives (AFAICT) a reboot. But the update wipes it, no trace left behind.
I have “take backup” turned off.
At this point I’m suspecting some corruption of the SD card OR the system.
Gonna see if a wipe-and-reinstall works
Nothing obvious in the logs.
I’d have to run a query across the db to see what tables are growing; that’s slightly outside my toolkit at the moment.
I suspect an event table; devices have been constant for months and so has db size.
Gah. I’ll nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
To get closure here, my fundamental problem is the usual “SD card corruption” that seems to be normal for Pi 4 + HA setups
The day after my original post, the Pi stopped working, completely.
So, I invested in an upgrade to SSD. A Crucial BX500 (240Gb. Nature abhors an empty disk drive, so gotta figure out what to stuff it with ) plus a UGREEN SATA-to-USB connector; the USB transfer rate should be MORE than adequate.
Boot time is MUCH faster, and everything seems to be mostly working - while I didn’t have a backup to restore from, I did have most of the yamls, and it was a good opportunity to tidy things up.
The SD card is still accessible, though, using the DiskInternals Linux_Reader app. That was useful to dig out bits of yaml that I’d overlooked.
Maybe one day I’ll install MariaDB on a SAN and write to that, but with the low usage and good reports from other people about SSDs, here’s hoping to no more corruptions. Touch wood!
), the system won’t update.
) plus a UGREEN SATA-to-USB connector; the USB transfer rate should be MORE than adequate.