Struggling installing HA on Yellow

Installation
1

Hello HA community,

I’m trying for 2 days now to install Home Assistant.
Yes I know there are many other topics like this across the community but none of proposed solutions helped me or all those topics got no answers!

I bought a fresh Yellow kit and a CM4 and NVME SSD for setting up my home assistant.
I’m a software developer and also hardware hobbyist, so I have some knowledge.
I followed the installation guide step by step, until I got stuck at the “Yellow LED turns permanent for 5 seconds” step => it stayed like this forever.

Many posts on the forums and so on suggest it’s DNS problems. ok… I am using a pihole in my network. So I completely disabled my pi hole for the moment, setting up my router to use Google DNS servers, restarted router and everything related tot he network. Still not working.

So I followed the other guide suggesting to use rpiboot to install the OS - I tried with putting the Installer for Yellow on the eMMC and tried the procedure again => no success, same as before.

Ok then I followed the Guide downloading the haos yellow image manually from the github releases page and using RPI Imager to directly put it on my NVME.
So far so good. This was the second day, so my pihole was enabled again. I tried booting the Yellow, it does start the supervisor (web page 4357 works, show all healthy) and it also shows the “Preparing Home Assistant” page (port 8123) … but it stays in this state forever… it told me no supervisor internet connection… Ok, people suggesting again it is a DNS issue again… so I disabled my pihole and everything again. back to google DNS.
Booting the yellow again, everything showing healthy and so on again.
This time I do NOT get the supervisor connection errors - all things seem to connect fine and work.

Then it says updating docker image from landingpage to 2025.3.3 and downloading docker image from ghcr.

The download now takes forever. it never comes to a finish, after an hour or two it aborts with either a 500 internal server error or a 404 image not found error.

I tried pulling the image myself on my host machine, its working without any problem in 1 - 2 Minutes.

I also left the yellow running and retrying doing the preparation step a whole night now, its just not getting anywhere.

I’m not more experienced with using a pi (this is the first one)
Please, can someone help me with this thing, how can I set up the home assistant on the yellow now?

Is there a way I can SSH during this setup to the raspberry and try analyze the docker image pull myself and so on? I see there are suggestions SSHing or setting DNS in HS directly … but I don’t even get that far that I could install an addon or access the settings since I’m already stuck at the Preparing Home Assistant step.

Thank you very much for your

2

Update:

I managed to connect oto the PI on the Yellow with this guide:
https://yellow.home-assistant.io/guides/use-serial-console-windows/

Then i did some experimenting.
I found out that the network interface end0 on the Yellow is having speed < 100 kb/s
but it is started with speed 1000 (gigabit)
however when trying to download anything the speed is like just a few bytes and drops even to 0 b/s …

nothing I tried did solve the issue.
I now did connect the wifi of the pi using
nmcli dev wifi connect password

I have no a speed of 12 mb/s. I’m now doing the first time setup with this approach and hope the wired network connection has a manageable speed later on …

If anyone has an idea how to fix the wired network speed on the yellow please let me know.

Update 2:
The setup did work now with the described way of solving it… the wired network still seems to be uuuultra slow.
This is NOT a problem of my local network! I have usualyl gigabit everywhere (also on other devices on the same switch).

3

Have you tried a different network cable and/or port on your router?

4

Hello MaxK, thank you for your reply!

Yes I already tried 3 different network cables, also I used the network cable of my PC (which has 10 GBit connection) which is usually working fine.

I also tried different ports on the switch and also directly connecting the yellow to the router in my basement.

I’m using Fritz!Box router and different Netgear switches in my local network.
I bought the Yellow with power supply (not PoE) and a RPi CM4 with 32 GB EMCC (I’m not using EMCC)

5

Good morning again,

just a little update:

I still did not get the Ethernet port to work at its full potential… or at least 100 mbit. Its just operating at < 100 kb

Same network cable, on the same switch port connected to my notebook or my PC has no problem, its getting 1 gbit without a problem. It must be something related to the raspberry / yellow.

For now I’m using the home assistant using the WIFI, it is giving me at least 12 mb/s, the distance to the next mesh access point is 0.5 meter, so connection should be stable, but in the long run I would still love to have the ethernet connection working.

If somebody has an idea what could be the issue please let me know! Thank you

6

Good evening,
I have a similar config (ha yellow, fritzbox, …) and was facing the same problem.
In my case, putting a cheap manageable tp-link switch between the fritzbox and the yellow AND setting the port speed (within the switch) to “100M Full duplex fixed” brought the speed up to 5M/s. Not great but better as the 350 K/s I was facing before. Seems somehow autonegotation / speed related. But I was never able to find out within two years… Maybe this works for you also.
Sven