Hi I’ve installed Home Assistant on Virtual Box, the installation does not get past the message for “this may take 20 minutes or more”
I’ve checked the firewall, DNS , the promiscous network settings. I’m guessing this is a common problem, and its just a bad environment. Any ideas, PLEASE?
20 minutes is often optimistic.
Depending on hardware, it could be more like hours. Give it plenty of time to complete.
The speed of the internet connection is really a big factor in the waiting time.
i have the same issue. Thought I’d tryhome assistant but if they cant even get an ova file right whats the point in trying! I have 900Mbps internet. The vm was left to do its thing for 6 hours or more. the new ova from the HA website is either broken or crap and broken!
I deployed the current ova last week, works just fine.
well i downloaded it yesterday, followed the instructions to the letter started it up and it sits at preparing home assistant for ever. The logs just go around in a loop.
Would it be an idea to look at what the logs say?
it just loops round like this?
2025-12-19 09:54:22.882 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.homeassistant.core] Error on Home Assistant installation. Retrying in 30sec
2025-12-19 09:54:52.883 INFO (MainThread) [supervisor.updater] No Supervisor connectivity, delaying version fetch
2025-12-19 09:54:52.883 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.homeassistant.core] Error on Home Assistant installation. Retrying in 30sec
2025-12-19 09:55:22.886 INFO (MainThread) [supervisor.updater] No Supervisor connectivity, delaying version fetch
2025-12-19 09:55:22.886 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.homeassistant.core] Error on Home Assistant installation. Retrying in 30sec
the networking must work as i can get to the gui showing the log errors from a different machine on the network
Have you checked the DNS settings?
just did that via chatgpt help. might be working now. Why does DNS not work out the box?
It does work out of the box for most. Glad you got it working.
Why download an ova for virtualbox if a vdi is available ?
thats what i meant lol.
I got it working in the end. had to faff about setting up dns for some dum reason. Then had to give it a reboot as jobs had got stuck then wait about 3 hours for it to kick into life once it was all working. Now I can have a play with it
I suffered through this for a couple days also. The 20 minutes was actually several hours, because the network throughput in the VBox image was 1/100th of what the network throughput was of the host. I don’t know why. I watched the download/upload network stats in vbox and eventually it finished after about 700-800MB of download. one time it came up, but after the image got deleted, i started from scratch. another time, even after all the network activity finished, the homeassistant.local:8132 wouldn’t come up. observer said everything was fine. several hours, no different, and no signs of why it wouldn’t work. the VM screen said the services were all up. After fighting with it, and starting fresh multiple times, I tried Hyper-V instead. Hyper-V went from “this may take 20 minutes” to up and running in less than a minute. i’m not looking back at Vbox to figure out why that config didn’t work consistently and why network throughput was so terrible in the Vbox VM.