Today around 2 am, my HA mini-PC (ACEPC T11) rebooted for no reason I could discern. This would not be concerning, but after the reboot, it ended up in the uefi shell instead of starting an operating system.
Naturally, I panicked, turned it off and went to bed. (jk)
Today, I had a closer look. It always boots up into what I think is the uefi shell that comes with the hardware. I have no idea how to manually boot anything from there, so I first tried “exit”. This worked nicely in so far, as it booted the Windows that came with the PC and is on the internal SSD. HA is on an SSD in the drivebay.
I checked the volume manager in Windows to see if the SSD HA is on had died, but it looked alive and well there. (At this point my #1 goal was to get access to the data partition and copy the latest backup off that PC. My newest one was 2 weeks old and was pre-update, i.e. I had plenty of config work I didn’t want to do again. Sadly, the volume where the backup go isn’t FAT, so Windows is useless as a recovery tool.) With nothing more to do in Windows, I rebooted and entered the BIOS.
There’s not much there, but looking at the boot order at least should tell me something about what the SSD with HA looks like to the BIOS. Sure, in UEFI that is way less interesting than in an old BIOS that lists drives, but it was the easiest thing to do as it didn’t involve grabbing a screwdriver.
The BIO boot order was “UEFI Shell”, “Windows Bootloader”, “Android on [name of the SSD with HA as I had just seen it in the Windows drive manager]”. Wait a minute! Android? I have several micro-PCs that can dual boot Windows and Android (with both being useless), so it didn’t strike me as too odd.
But it indicated not the internal SSD, but the second SSD I had added. And that only had HAOS on it, nicely put there as a disc image flattening the whole drive. At least that is what I pretend I noticed at that point, in reality it puzzled that together after I selected that boot entry for a one-time startup and HA came up just fine.
I then changed the boot order to have that “Android” entry as the first boot device, put the mini PC back at its place, and turned it on. HA came up just fine.
Now, I have to admit I consider myself very knowledgeable regarding booting…for everything that’s older than UEFI. At some point, I had no reason to keep up with modern tech.
This means, I have no idea what broke. Why did the system boot into HA with no issues for well over a year and now suddenly comes up in that UEFI shell?
Did the boot order in the BIOS magically get swapped? I don’t think so. It’s been a while since I initially installed HA, but I don’t think “Android” was the boot device I had to select there.
And, most importantly, do I have to expect the device/installation/SSD to die soon? Is this just the first sign of a hardware failure? And if so, which piece is failing?
HAOS is on 15.1 (as I didn’t see anything on .2 to update now)
HA is 2025.4.1 (I’m fine with a monthly update session, thank you very much, I have more hobbies to take up my time)
Both updates were installed 2 weeks ago; that’s when I last downloaded a backup.