Reading the comments on HAOS 17.2, I’m hesitant to upgrade not knowing the bootloader version of my RPI4. Ive tried the commands in the other threads using Terminal and SSH into the Pi with Putty and keep getting ‘unrecognized command’. I am not fluent in Linux and need assistance in finding out what my bootloader version is. Thank you.
Personally I would pop in another SD card with a regular PIOS on it and update the eeproms, then you can see what the version is.
Yep, the github issue warns you about this in the first post:
Hook up a keyboard & monitor, then you should be able to check eeprom version & update from there. Step by step instructions are here.
If I leave the external drive plugged in, the board goes in a continuous reboot. If I unplug the drive, the board it eventually gets to a prompt saying “waiting for the Home assistant CLI to be ready”. It lasted a bit too long, so I hit ctrl-c and got a prompt where I was able to enter the eeprom update command.
I rebooted, and same thing: if the drive is connected, it reboots continuously, if the drive is not plugged in, it gets to the same prompt, no activity showing on the LED. If I hit ctrl-c again and run the epprom update command, it shows the eeprom has updated successfully from the current 2023 version to the latest 2025 version.
The data is on that external drive.
Not sure if this link will work but it shows the systemctl output
The boot up messages show a failure for loading the containerd container runtime.
Then it’s probably a power issue & the drive requires more power than the green USB can supply on startup. Make sure you use a powered USB drive & power your drive separately.
I don’t believe that the issue is the power supply, the board had been running fine for 24 hours, and the Rpi4B is plugged into a powered hub with power supply of 24W or 36W.
Is there a way to find out for sure?
Both the Pi and the hard drive are now plugged into the powered hub, same issue.The drive is recognized and fsck runs successfully, which I would think is an indication that the drive receives enough power, however, loading containerd still fails and the reboot happens after several attempts to load containerd.
Sorry, I’m out of ideas
No worries, thanks for your help. I will reinstall and report back on the result.
Thank you! I will give that a try.
@ShadowFist and All,
Reinstalling worked fine, except that the backup I had made before the update was nowhere to be found, the external drive didn’t even have the Share, Backup and other standard folders that had been created.
Anyway, there was not that much to reinstall and it all went smoothly. The system is up and running with both the Pi and the external drive powered by the USB hub, and my dashcam footage is archiving onto the drive as we speak.
The only strange thing is that although the drive is used by HA for data, it does not appear under System-Storage. Is this a concern? Should I try to fix this?
The other thing I found odd was that the disk usage bar shows 192GB for system usage while the SD card is a 64GB one, and when I looked at the drive with a Linux drive viewer in Windows, it had a swap file of 1.3GB. I thought that the swap file was part of the system, not part of the data… and that is far from accounting for the 192GB reported as system usage.
Anyway, the important thing is that it all works now.
Thanks for your help.
Cheers,
Gaetano.
