You may be onto something. I pulled the SD out and plugged into my Win10 PC, which says the E: drive is corrupt and needs formatting. Maybe a Win10 thing - does this sound normal? There is an F: drive with a few .dtb and .txt files and an /overlays directory, but nothing that looks like my config.
I’m reasonably new at this, I know I’ve made several image backups via HA (including one after the last ESPHome devices were added). Are backups stored somewhere by default? I don’t recall setting a specific location up.
If that is the problem you should considered running HA using USB SSD. Its much faster and unlike microSD which easily corrupted being bombarded with the read/write access.
Thanks for the assist - I’ve not had an SD card fail before, but then again this is the first one I’ve used on a system with frequent read/write cycles.
That notification is normal in Windows!
As the Home Assistant OS is Linux based, it uses Linux partitions and Windows doesn’t recognise this by default, so it’s says it’s corrupt. So not a proper way to determine I’m afraid.
Ah, I wondered if that could be the case. I’ll reconnect my linux PC tomorrow and see if I can read the SD card on it. Fingers crossed, not looking forward to completely rebuilding (and hoping I can recover all the configs). Then again in locked down Sydney it’s not like I can really go out anywhere for the weekend :-(.
That sucks indeed :-s
However if you manage to fetch some files from the old SD card, or even just your snapshots it might already gain you quite some time!
Gparted has a usb stick bootable version, can repair/extract data from linux file systems https://gparted.org/livecd.php
Windows terminal now lets you install linux terminals ubuntu/debian/etc. If you’re comfortable working from a command line you can access linux files from there. https://ubuntu.com/wsl
Thanks @Mikefila! I eventually worked out I needed to update my old Ubuntu laptop to read exFAT (which Ubuntu says the SD card is formatted for, but isn’t loaded by default!) and can now mount the SD card - but can only read one partition that only has two system files in it. So no real luck there in retrieving anything of merit.
Hey @Mikefila, have you any experience with gparted on a Dell (Win10 i7) laptop? I created a boot USB and tried booting on my Dell Latitude with the gparted imaged USB installed, but after a complete system scan the laptop goes into a system recovery mode and wants to download & run Dell recovery software - and doesn’t execute gparted. The laptop is running perfectly when I do a normal Win10 boot!
Second question - to use WSL | Ubuntu, if I’m reading the instructions correctly I need to join
a Windows insiders program and download a new preview version of Win10 first? Did you have to do this? Keen to avoid mass changes to my primary work tool if I can get away with it…may have to build up another laptop first if this is the case.
Starting from a usb is sometimes blocked by default it may need to be enabled in the bios. You could first try shut down, press the start button and start pressing f8. See if it gives you an option for boot from usb. If not you’ll have to google the specific model and enable usb boot.
I first installed windows power shell 7 and then added the desktop environments from the windows store application. There was just a minimum version req for windows. When I checked, I was already using a newer version.
I think when it was first released you had to use the preview version to get access to it.
Thanks - I was using the boot menu to enable USB boot (off by default). I realised I had a Sandisk recovery licence and tried using their tool, which seemed to confirm there was a partition fault on the SD card.
I’ve given up and started rebuilding my HA config now; aside from ESPHome and YAML config it’s pretty smooth going so far (certainly a lot easier than the first build a couple of years ago!). Google Drive back-up was the first integration I added…not going to get burnt a second time.
The WSL | Ubuntu shell still looks interesting, will give it a go once the rebuild is complete.