Please Help! Catastrophic failure (VirtualBox VM not booting).. How to restore Snapshot?

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

I’m in a real mess. After spending countless hours of getting my Home Assistant VM configured and running perfectly… even creating multiple Supervisor snapshots (in case I ever have to restore from a disaster), my Home Assistant VM wont boot up.

Virtual box will start the VM until it reaches:

Welcome to Home Assistant:
HASSIO login:  [36.334556%] overlayfs:  overlapping upperdir path
[  44.564444] overlayfs:  overlapping upperdir path
[  53.644544] overlayfs:  overlapping upperdir path
[  61.466674] overlayfs:  overlapping upperdir path
[  69.321334] overlayfs:  overlapping upperdir path
_

If I press Enter, it just presents me with the below login prompt:

HASSIO Login:

How can I restore my VM back exactly the way it was when I created my last snapshot?

If I could at least get to the Configuration folder via samba or via SSH, I could recover my configuration files.

Now, its even worse. After I reboot the VM, it doesn’t get passed the Boot Chooser menu. It keeps trying to autoboot… then clears the screen very quickly, then it does the same thing. I cant read what it says, because the screen clears very quickly. If I press the number 3 or 2, it starts to boot all the way up until the login prompt again displaying the same overlapping upperdir path again.

PS: If I login as root in the above login prompt, I get the following:

Last login: Friday: June …… on tty1
[ERROR] Somethings going wrong! Jump into emergency console…

2

First, download any linux live cd image, boot the VM with it and try to copy your snapshots to another place.
Then i would do a new install.

3

Thank you very much for the quick reply. I will do that

4

@VDRainer How do I boot the Linux Live cd image with the VM if I can’t even boot the VM properly? Please see how far I get with the VM in my original post.

5

Add the iso in storage.

Auswahl_362
Auswahl_362715×259 42.3 KB

and edit boot order on system.
Auswahl_363
Auswahl_363715×269 39.5 KB

6

Thanks VDRainer. I did as you mentioned. However, Virtualbox won’t boot to the liveCD. This is what I get:

messedup
messedup1019×644 42.1 KB

7

Try it with disabled EFI.
Auswahl_364

8

Thanks for the tip. I really appreciate you help. I actually took a different approach to recovering from this disaster. I extracted the VDI image itself… then, extracted the IMG files within it using the below tool (since my HOST OS is Windows 10):

…eventually gaining access to my snapshots in the backup folder.

I then downloaded and setup a brand new VDI… placing my snapshots back… then doing a wipe/restore from my latest snapshot.

In the future, I plan to make backup copies of the VDI in addition to creating snapshots to be better prepared if this happens again.

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9

Thanks for writing up how you were able to get retrieve the data from the VDI - I’l have to extract the same way you did.
Do you happen to know how this failure occurred? I only ask because the same thing happened to me… I have a VERY basic setup with some Z wave switches, an IR blaster and one automation based on the sun so I’m surprised I don’t see this issue listed elsewhere. I am using a Windows LTSC “server” with a UPS that is on running a number of over services that is very stable other than HA.
Thanks!

10

@Sticklizer To this day, I still don’t know what I did to cause the issue. At the time, I was rebooting the VM relatively frequently; since I was adding/configuring several items in the configuration.yaml file; also, I updated the Home Assistant OS. I’m guessing I might have rebooted the VM inadvertently while it was still upgrading the OS.

One thing I didn’t mention in the solution for this thread. Since my HOST OS is Windows. I had to use the below tool to read the IMG files I extract from my VM VDI. I wasn’t able to read those IMG file natively within Windows.

2 Likes