Strange partitions in HAOS x86

So I’ve taken the plunge and decided to increase the IQ of my house. I’ve settled on running HAOS on a second-hand Lenovo Thinkcentre M72e since I already have a couple of old 2.5" SSDs laying around. The main PC hasn’t arrived yet but I decided to try to get ahead a little by flashing the OS to the drive via my main work PC. Everything seems to have worked as it should but I’m seeing many partitions on the drive and I’m not sure if it’s correct or not. It seems to have made a single 32MB EFI partition and 7 “healthy primary partitions” ( 24MB, 256MB, 24MB, 256MB, 8MB, 96MB, and 1.25GB).

  1. Why are there so many partitions?
  2. Will HA make use of the full 1TB of available space as it needs?
  3. Am I worrying about nothing?

Sorry if this is common knowledge but I’m brand new to this and most of the videos and walkthroughs use an SBC for this (Seeing as those are more expensive these days than a higher spec’d ultra-small PC from a few years ago, I went that route) and don’t mention much about how the OS variant of HA deals with more than a micro-SD card’s worth of storage space.

The image file does contain all those partitions:

Device                         Start     End Sectors  Size Type
haos_generic-x86-64-8.1.img1    2048   67583   65536   32M EFI System
haos_generic-x86-64-8.1.img2   67584  116735   49152   24M Linux filesystem
haos_generic-x86-64-8.1.img3  116736  641023  524288  256M Linux filesystem
haos_generic-x86-64-8.1.img4  641024  690175   49152   24M Linux filesystem
haos_generic-x86-64-8.1.img5  690176 1214463  524288  256M Linux filesystem
haos_generic-x86-64-8.1.img6 1214464 1230847   16384    8M Linux filesystem
haos_generic-x86-64-8.1.img7 1230848 1427455  196608   96M Linux filesystem
haos_generic-x86-64-8.1.img8 1427456 4048895 2621440  1.3G Linux filesystem

Some I can’t mount (for whatever reason, didn’t look closer), some look like the partitions used for /boot and /boot/efi, and others look like they contain a minimal OS with supervisor and Docker.

Since it’s a generic x86 image meant for NUC’s, I’m fairly certain it will use all the space available.

Ok. So it’s a linux thing and how it appropriates space on the drive vs. how it looks in windows? I can see how that would make sense if that’s the case. I have no clue as to how linux systems work as far as how they manage storage.

When Home Assistant first boots up it will adjust the partitions to use all of the available space. This way the image can be installed on any media that meets the minimum recommendation.

1 Like

Awesome! Thank you!

Hi Scottua25.

I’m out in the same experiment getting a ThinkCenter M81 to run HAOS.
The computer simply won’t boot on the hassos-xxxx disk. I keep getting the BIOS reply there is no OS on the disk…!
If you had success getting the ThinkCenter to run HAOS, pls. share the work around.

Best regards
BentP.

I know this is a little old but I ran into the same problem with a Lenovo thinkcenter m92p.
What I found is the same exact drive same installation, on the internal SATA port won’t boot, but it will boot as an external drive on a usb adapter.

I found the resolution here:

Basically, you need to boot from an Ubuntu or Linux external boot drive, with the HA drive installed, use CLI to send a command. What worked for me was:
sudo efibootmgr -c -l /EFI/BOOT/BOOTx64.EFI -L HomeAssistant

I have no idea what that actually does but it worked.
If anyone knows please share.