That’s because the process is the same and there has been no update to Rufus. However, I prefer Balena Etcher.
Goto Install Ubuntu and download the Intel or AMD 64-bit architecture iso file. This is the file to flash to the USB stick using BalenaEtcher.
You can boot the USB from any x86 PC, and select “Try Ubuntu”. (Not install). This runs the Ubuntu OS from the USB drive. Play with it, get some feel for Ubuntu - just for fun. When you reboot the PC without the Ubuntu USB plugged in, your Windows boots normally.
I have only installed HAOS by flashing the HAOS x86 image file directly to the M.2 SSD. My wife’s Beelink has a 500 GB NVMe M.2 2280 SSD.
If your Beelink uses the M.2 SSD for the boot device, you can skip all the above about flashing Ubuntu to a thumbdrive. Just use “Method 2” in the installation instructions. Method 2 is the easiest and most straightforward method of all.
Buy an M.2 USB adapter (This is the one I use), use BalenaEtcher or Rufus to flash the HAOS x86 image to the M.2, put it back into the Beelink, boot, restore from your last backup, done.
I have a nice new MNVe drive for the NUC. To flash the HAOS image on it, I put it in a USB enclosure, connected it to my laptop, and tried to use Balena Etcher to write this image to it (as specified in the instructions linked above). I’ve tried this a dozen times, from 2 different computers and using both “Flash from File” and “Flash from URL” and the failure is the same every time: Balena chugs for a while gradually completing the bar chart for flashing, then proceeds on to verifying, slowly completing the bar chart there as well, and then it displays a message that: " Something went wrong. If it is a compressed image, please check that the archive is not corrupted. The writer process ended unexpectedly"
Below are screenshots of the error and the debug console messages:
As far as I understand, this is a failure of “Balena Etcher” not of Home Assistant, but the only imager tool listed in HAOS’s installation instructions doesn’t work. Any advice?
Oops. I wrote too soon. Found a fix and am posting it here in case anyone else finds this and is trying to do the same:
It turns out that the .xz image file is actually compressed. You can decompress it (double-click on it if you’re using a Mac), and then try the process again using the decompressed image file. This completed successfully.
There are many who will say OVERKILL; and they are probably right. But when you can restart Home Assistant in a few seconds, compile ESPHome in a few seconds, perform a backup in less than a minute, you will never go back to the Yellow or the Pi.
Order another M.2 SSD for Home Assistant. Save the original M.2 (the one with Windows 11 on it) in case you ever migrate HAOS to another platform in the future.
Thanks for your guidance. I can not foresee to use the mini pc for anything else than HA. I have not yet explored ESPHome or analyzed what I can do with it.
Ok, thanks everyone (especially @NathanCu and @stevemann )! I’m now up and running with a new host and things look solid. I’m writing a summary here of what I learned and did in case anyone else searching comes across this and has similar questions/challenges.
Recap of situation and goals
I wanted a replacement for a HA Yellow (due to both some physical damage to my current HA Yellow and the desire to bump up my specs a little.)
My “from” setup was a HA Yellow with a CM5 (no onboard storage) plus an MNVe. I have devices that use: Z-Wave, ESPHome, Matter-over-wifi, and MQTT (plus others with cloud integrations).
I wanted the new solution to use HAOS bare metal (for ease of administration), and I wanted it to use a single, physically removable drive. (This (a) makes it easier to flash/duplicate/replace and (b) prevents me having to set up home assistant to, e.g., store history on a different drive than the core, etc.)
Early findings
I narrowed pretty quickly to an X86-based mini-PC. (Mini-PC because the Mac mini-sized form factor works a little better for my specific setup. X86 was a personal preference given other things I may repurpose the hardware for down the road.)
The pretty standard option seems to be a line of mini-PCs called “NUCs.” These were originally made by Intel who has since licensed the brand name to ASUS. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing special about the NUC line as opposed to other Mini-PCs like those from Beelink. (I also considered a few BeeLink models before selecting the NUC I bought, and they looked very reasonable.) Note that there are WIDE range of specs (and physical sizes) for the different NUCs currently for sale, ranging from low-spec sub-$100 units to $1K+ monsters with moderately advanced graphics that seem to be marketed for gaming.
To be able to install HAOS and Home Assistant, you need at least a few gigabytes of RAM (not certain if it’s 2 or 4), and it must support UEFI. (UEFI is the system that controls boot settings (among other things), a replacement for the more-traditional BIOS used by older computers. My understanding is that most X86 computers made in the last ~10 years support UEFI, but it’s critical that you have this.)
NUCs seem to be available for sale as either “pre-built” computers or “barebones”/“kits”. The difference is that pre-built computers include a drive, RAM, and a pre-installed Windows OS. So if you buy a “kit” you need to buy your own RAM and drive (and you don’t have to buy Windows; yay!)
The general process for migration is to install a factory-new image of Home Assistant on the new hardware, backup (within Home Assistant) the old hardware, then restore the backup to the new hardware.
What I did and how it went
I ended up getting a massively-overspecced NUC 15 Pro. (I did this because I anticipate repurposing it for something else in the future. If you just want a simple HA Yellow replacement, I’d recommend getting a simpler NUC or perhaps a BeeLink. There are mininmum specs published for HAOS. So the 15 Pro is not a recommendation… just sharing what I did as a datapoint.) Mine came as a “kit” so I bought compatible RAM and a 2TB MNVe drive. It’s really nice, but also completely overkill for just running Home Assistant!
These are the steps I followed to migrate:
On my HA Yellow, go to Settings > System > Backups and create a new manual backup. Include everything. Once it finishes download the backup to my laptop. If you have encryption on, you’ll also need to download the “emergency kit” (which contains the keys to decrypt the backup). I also made sure that I had the username and password for my Mosquitto broker account.
Shut down and unplug the HA Yellow. Thank you for your service!
Release the static IP I had assigned in my router for my HA Yellow.
Pop the new MNVe into a USB enclosure and connect it to my laptop.
I’m now following these instructions (see the section titled " METHOD 2: INSTALLING HAOS DIRECTLY FROM A BOOT MEDIUM"). The basic idea is that I’ll be putting a factory-fresh image of a hard drive that includes HAOS plus home assistant onto the new MNVe, then I’ll stick it into the NUC and boot up. Here’s what that consists of.
I installed Balena Etcher on my laptop. I downloaded this image (Note that I expect this link will change as new updates to the OS are released, so check back to the instructions for the latest link!). Un-zip the image before using it! (Note: I tried doing this with the as-downloaded .xz file and it failed repeatedly!) Then use Balena Etcher to flash the (unzipped!) image onto the MNVe.
Take the MNVe out of the USB enclosure and install it in the NUC (along with the RAM). Connect the NUC to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. (Note, I believe this is the only time you will need the peripherals.)
Turn on the NUC and immediately, repeatedly press the F2 key to take you into the BIOS settings. Make sure UEFI is on (it was already for me), and turn off safe boot. I also wanted to change the setting to have the computer return the power to previous state after an outage (so that I can remotely restart the device by power cycling its outlet after a shutdown). Save settings
Move the NUC into its “production” location, plug in ethernet. Tell my router to use a static IP for the NUC – the same static IP the old HA Yellow had been using. Move my USB Zwave controller to the NUC. Boot up!
Point a web browser to the same URL (IP address:8123) that I had been using to access Home Assistant on my Yellow. I see a “welcome” screen. Choose the option to restore from backup. Choose the backup file that I downloaded to my laptop way back in step 1. Wait… and wait… for it to upload. Then you get a screen asking you what all you want to restore. Check everything. Then wait… and wait…
Eventually Home Assistant booted up into a familiar view! All of the Z-wave devices showed up in Z Wave JS UI. The ESPHome devices were all listed in the ESPHome builder (but first compiling takes a LONG time). The Matter-over-wifi devices worked. The Mosquito broker needed reauthentication – had to re-enter the username and password (see step 1 above), but this solved it. Everything seems to be working!
Impressions
Everything is working happily. The new machine is a little snappier, though to be honest I don’t really notice a difference on boot time, and ESPHome compiling is a bit faster but not life changing (e.g., a typical smart plug goes from 300 seconds to 55 seconds, which is admittedly a 6x speed boost but compiling for dozens of devices is still irritating ). Seems solid and reliable. It’s frustrating having to hook a monitor and mouse up to change things like the power-state-after-an-outage, but that’s only a minor complaint. No impressions on typical power usage yet…
Anyway, good luck to anyone reading and thanks for the help!
Hey @EndUser , I think the comment about ESPHome was directed to me.
(ESPHome is an ecosystem of ESP32-based devices — things like smart plugs or smart lightswitches or temperature/air quality sensors. They typically operate over wifi. If you connect one to the same wifi network as your home assistant controller it will likely auto-discover it. Then you can also optionally build your own firmware for the device using the ESPHome builder add-on. The reason we’re talking about ESPHome in this thread is because I need to make sure that after I migrate to the new home assistant controller, I want to make sure all of the ESPHome devices in my home start talking to the new controller just like they had been to the old.)
Thanks. I will explore it later.
Right now I believe that I succeeded in putting Unbuntu on a USB flash drive and tomorrow I will try to install HAOS on the mini pc. It is not easy for this amateur techie but we will see tomorrow.
I have my Yellow Box on a Kasa switch and if need be I can remotely power cycle the Yellow Box in the Kasa App on my Iphone. I plan to do the same with the mini pc.
Well, that was one of rate benefits of having proxmox (in my case): easy restart of HAOS. But, since the need for this happens very rarely it doesn’t justify complexity of proxmox, particularly in the case of crash and restore…
One of easiest options is esp power switch (tuya, shelly, sonoff, esphome…). Getting one with power measurement and you have energy control as side function.
Unfortunately, a soft reboot doesn’t always do it for me. My main need for a power cycle is to restart the zwave controller… which generally requires an actual break in USB power. It’s easy to start this (just choose shutdown from the system menu), but it’s more challenging to wake it back up. On my POE HA Yellow, I could just connect to my router and power cycle the poe on the port the Yellow was plugged into. With the NUC I’ve plugged it into a switchable outlet (Unifi PDU).
Many, many thanks to the wonderful @NathanCu, @mike15 and the others who guided me. It was succesful and I also succesfully migrated the Zigbee network.
Now I hope that my Zwave issues have been resolved and time will tell.
THANKS
I was talking about hard reset… you can do “hard reset” in proxmox (restart of VM in proxmox is the same as cutting power in classic haos), while if you put power module i was talking about in a power line (230v) you can cut 230V with relay in that module.
). Seems solid and reliable. It’s frustrating having to hook a monitor and mouse up to change things like the power-state-after-an-outage, but that’s only a minor complaint. No impressions on typical power usage yet…
