Power outage - no HA

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

hi all,

I just had a power outage here, and my HA/RaspberryPI-4 is no longer available via the webUI, nor via the router. This, the power outage, has happened multiple times before, and the HA/RPI has just reappeared with no harm done every time, this one seems more permanent. I’ll be getting a UPS for next time.

At first I thought it was a web issue, then I noticed the router no longer recognised the rpi. I’ve looked through the forum, seen various power outage threads, and have tried altering the sequence of power-on, with waits of several minutes in-between, so far to no avail.

  1. router + rpi switched on at the same time
  2. router - wait 5 mins - then rpi
  3. rpi - wait wait 5 mins - then router
    Nada - the router doesn’t seem to see the ethernet cable connected rpi anymore.

I’m hoping the rpi isn’t toast.

Any helpful suggestions welcome.

2

Connect a screen.

3

Yep, will do that as I am able to. Maybe it’s just stuck in start-up somewhere, is what you’re thinking?

4

The screen will tell you what’s going on and why it’s not starting, plus it puts you in the CLI immediately so you can type ‘info’ and see if it’s trying to load or what.

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5

Everything is just guess work until you can see / tell what is going on :slight_smile:

6

Ok, got a screen attached, and the rpi begins to start up, before rapidly coming to a standstill with a recurring error message. It’s difficult to grab the info. as it scrolls up the screen, but the gist of it is:

...
Card did not respond to voltage select ...
...
(seems to continue here just fine with lots of "OK ..." messages, then)
...
failed to start containerd container daemon runtime
write access unavailable
can't open block dev
cannot connect to docker daemon
cannot connect to docker daemon
cannot connect to docker daemon
cannot connect to docker daemon
....

That’s as far as I’ve got so far, looks kinda borked?

7

It seems to be the card that is toast.

I had an old HA instance on a mini-sandisk for a similar HA project, and swapping the cards brings the rpi-4 up again. Doing the same in reverse (ie; putting the suspect card in a working rpi-4) does not. So it’s the card.

So now it’s upgrading, reconfiguring, and finding a power-outage solution for the future, probably a UPS. Still, and I’m not an electrician so maybe it’s obvious, but it’s also a bit worrying that HA borked on the power being tripped elsewhere.

ps. thanks for the prompt pointer to the display @fleskefjes and @CO_4X4 , it was helpful to get started on diagnosis. :+1:

8

Great to hear that you found the issue. I would recommend not using SD-cards for storage, there’s a lot of read/write and it will wear out SD-cards sooner or later.

9

maybe a USB stick or somesuch is preferable?

10

Not a stick, they can also be worn out quickly. SSD is preferable, or a spinning drive if you have that laying around.

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11

Any storage media can fail without notice. Having a good backup (a backup that is regularly tested to prove you can restore successfully) is mandatory.

1 Like