Trying to factory reset HA Blue, won't show up as mass storage

Configuration
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Hey everyone,

I’m ready to start over with Home Assistant after years of tinkering and learning, I’d like to start fresh.

I have the HA Blue for my device, and I am trying to follow along with these directions

and

I for sure have the dipswitch set to SPI and followed the directions to a “t” and running the command
“ums /dev/mmcblk0” does not throw any errors or the like.

But for the life of me I cannot get it to show up as an attached storage device on my either my Macbook (M1 Pro) or on my Windows machine (Surface Pro 4).

I’m not sure what else to do or diagnose at this point so I can reload a fresh copy of HA and it’s OS on here.

Any tips or gotchas to share? Thanks in advance!

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According to the help I just got in the Home Assistant discord server (Discord) Assuming your Home Assistant is still functional, just delete (or rename) the /config folder (or just everything inside it, including all hidden subfolders) then reboot. (Not just a Home Assistant Restart, a full host reboot)

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Thanks for trying to assist.

My neighbor also wanted to start fresh, he ended up buying the little USB programmer to plug the main chip into and the belanaEtcher was able to install a fresh copy of HA on there.

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So for posterity, I was trying to start over with my HA Blue. After looking over the green instructions I got a clue to wipe the data drive.

So presuming you want to start over completely, make sure you have backups, etc. Connect to HDMI/keyboard console and at the CLI:

ha os datadisk wipe

This will wipe the datadisk and reboot. You’ll then have a fresh install to work with. While the green instructions state it automatically installs the latest os on reboot, that wasn’t the case on my blue so I ran the updates before starting my config process.

1 Like
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Thank you for this post “for posterity’s sake. It was perfect and exactly what I needed.