Resolving Errors

 For the past several months I have been dealing with issues updated Home Assistant OS. Anytime I tried to upgrade from 7.2 my HUSBZB-1 stick stopped showing up as an option for the zwave and zigbee integrations. Other users reported similar issues with version 7.3 so I waited for 7.4. Once 7.4 was confirmed by other users to correct the issue I tried to upgrade. 

 When I initially upgraded to 7.4 the issue persisted so I though the other uses might have been mistaken about it being resolved. I worked through downgrading the OS to 7.2 and waited for a future update to resolve it. Then I forgot all about the issue until upgrading a few weeks later. In my haste to install  a core update I also updated the OS. This lead to my post about disaster recovery. 

This week I finally circled back to this issue since Home Assistant somehow seemed to start automatically running the update over and over again forcing the system to OS 7.6. This completly crippled my smart home. This lead me to searching the old threads on forums where other users had similar issues with OS 7.3  and thinking I needed to upgrade my HUSBZB-1 stick to the latest firmware as recommended here. I was ultimately successful in updating the firmware, but my issues persisted. 

At this point I was left thinking either I needed to start from scratch  or a new zwave/zigbee stick. I decided to start checking all reasonable solutions before paying for some new hardware, so I flashed another small SSD I had in my spare parts bin with the latest image for installing Home Assistant OS 8.0. At this point I chose to initialize the new instance of Home Assistant and try to configure the stick with a single zwave outlet and a single zigbee switch  to confirm if starting from scratch was a possible solution. 

This attempt failed also; the stick was still not showing up as expected. Additionally the fresh install was not reporting the expected 8.0 OS version, it was still reporting 7.6.  This lead me to look at the Raspberry Pi hardware as that was one of two constants in all these issues. I realized I still had the micro-sd card inserted, which had the PI image that is supposed to be used to switch the PI to booting for USB instead of micro-sd. I am still not sure how this was causing the issue, but after removing the micro-sd card and switching back to my original SSD the updates completed successfully to 7.6 with the stick working. This allowed me to finally get completely up to date.