Trouble with HAOS 10.5 update - Home Assistant now won't boot

My HA installation runs HASS in a VirtualBox VM on a Mac Mini. It has been running fine, but this morning an upgrade of HAOS was offered from 10.4 to 10.5. I checked the "Take Backup" option and proceeded to install the update. When the update finished it unusually offered two "repairs", one of which I selected regarding "default disk??". It said it was fixed, but HA now does not boot.

I have tried rebooting the VM, and rebooting the Mac but to no avail - HA just hangs indefintely on "Waiting for Home Assistant CLI to start"

Where do I go from here ? Any ideas, or is it a clean install of HA (aargh !!) ?

I realise that this forum does not specifically offer Home Assistant help, but I also see there are a number of users on here with strong HA skills !

Wish I could help, but I too had issues with HA update earlier. Mine runs as HAOS on a small PC. Reboot failed after update, but a power cycle of the box brought it back, thankfully. Good luck, and be careful out there...

Simkna Same here, I have to power cycle the Pi4 to get it running. It started acting all weird

I have a sick feeling that if I had just declined the offered repair and power cycled the Mac Mini, all would have come back ...
Ah well, another lesson learned.

As it is, I had to create a new VM based on haos_ova-10.5.vdi from https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux/
This booted successfully, and I hoped I could just login to HA and restore from the backup - but no, because it was a new instance running, it took me through onboarding where you can only create a new user, not login as an existing user.

So everything is gone - fancy dashboards, automations, Apple Watch integrations, usage history - and I am starting from scratch with SpeakToTheGeek on YouTube !

I am DONE with updating HA, and I am DONE with fancy dashboards, Apple Watch integration etc. I will just have a very basic install, just enough to do some Octopus Flux automation, and that will be it. I get that it is a complex piece of software, running on multiple platforms, with multiple maintainers - it is just not stable enough to be used as a single source of truth.

YMMV.

If anyone can point out what I did wrong, how I could have recovered my original setup, please let me know for the next time I feel my finger hovering over the nagging update button ...

Lofthouse Can't fix the original issue but when you take a fresh HA install and are presented with the login screen to create your admin user, there's a link at the bottom to restore from backup. Try that?

I worked out (too late) that when taking a backup in HA, you need to download the backup to local storage as an additional step for just this eventuality. I have done this now, so will be in a better place if/when this happens again.

I have calmed down a bit now, and am seeing the positives like _2 entities gone, no bloat from integrations I rarely use, simpler automations now I know what I'm doing, and clean minimalist dashboards. Maybe the purge was for the best !

Thanks for replying 👍

Lofthouse have a look at the Google drive backup add on. You can use that to backup to google drive and also an external usb or NAS drive using samba. Good to have backups in different places.

I've gone to 10.5 on my NUC with no issues at all. As it happens I backed up the image via proxmox just in case (Hadn't seen this at the time) but it all just worked. Sorry