HC2 OS flash drive swap = backup encryption failed [SOLVED]

[Ondrej Bajer 2]

Hi guys,

 

is it possible to swap HC2 OS Flash drive (internal SLC USB stick) with a 3rd party drive, please?

 

I was already able to clone the original drive to a fast and reliable 3rd party USB stick and everything worked okay. Like GUI and the Z-Wave too, BUT I lost the ability to restore my old backups.

On top of that, HC2 with 3rd party OS Flash drive was unable to create new backups too. All the attempts failed with the messages "Backup encryption failed" or "Unable to decrypt backup".

IMHO, there's some property of OS Flash drive that is being used for backup encryption key generation. Like SN, Vendor, etc.

 

BACKGROUND INFO:

I have 4x HC2 now. Two of them are in production, other two dedicated as spares.

• A couple of years ago, my oldest HC2 died with SLC drive errors and infinite boot loop. Fibaro support was great, they fixed the HW in Poland, put a new OS Flash drive in, reimaged and in the meantime they transferred my cloud backups to my 2nd HC2, so I was able to restore and function normally within two days.
• Two months ago, original powersupply of my 1st HC2 died. I swapped it for a 3rd party 12V 4A PSU, works like a charm.
• Last week, my 2nd HC2 experienced weird error after performing a regular cloud backup. Services unable to restart, no WebGUI after a manual reboot, Recovery mode stuck with "system busy" banner. I hope that it was just a SW glitch, not another SLC failure. After a half-day of fiddling with Recovery mode, I was finally able to reimage and restore from the cloud backup. All good.

 

Now I see that the hardware will not survive for another 10 years, not to mention that I need a sustainable strategy for more than that.

 

HC2 is already EOL, so I can imagine that after a couple of years even Fibar/Nice won't be able to repair broken HC2 units as there won't be enough spare parts...and enough will to do these repairs.

To be honest, migration to HC3 is not really a sustainable solution, as it will became EOL sooner or later too. Not to mention that I am too old to painfully migrate my VDs, QAs, Scenes and LUA scripts to a new platform every time the gear reaches End Of Sales.

For a lot of us, this is not just a gadget to control lights and blinds, but we built our houses around this automation, inluding all the essentials.

Therefore, I'd really like to be able to fix most of the common issues by myself. Like reimage OS drive to a fresh 3rd party device.

 

Thank you for any interesting ideas!

Edited November 3, 2025 by Ondrej Bajer
solved

[Ondrej Bajer 2]

UPDATE:

So, by experimenting today I found that it IS possible to boot HC2 from a 3rd party drive and even got standard backup/restore working again.

The trick to re-enable backup/restore, including the necessary encryption part, is a bit dirty, but it works :)

 

Right now I have my spare HC2 booting from the Transcend JetFlash 920 USB drive, but the final state should be an internal mSATA SSD or even 2.5" SATA SSD.

I hope that on top of additional speed the SSD of a decent size will deliver much better TBW endurance than the original 2GB USB SLC flashdrive had.

 

BTW:

• While at it, I've also changed the RAM from original 1GB to 4GB, which according to the specsheet of Mitac PD11T motherboard is the addressable maximum.
• The board supports 1066, 1333 and 1600 MHz RAM, but all of them will run at 1066 Mhz only, for a shame.
• I like how original designer of HC2 HW used that Atmel + Z-Wave add-on board and connected it directly to on-board USB header and to PC front-panel header. Not only that it allows communication between x86 and Atmel, but also very elegant hardware-based watchdog. Which I had a chance to see in operation...
• Looking at it, it should not be a huge problem to replace the original motherboard and 2-core Intel Atom N2800 with something much more powerfull and still connect the add-on board to it properly. But, that would bump the consumption from those nice 13W to a much higher number.

 

Well, is there anybody who already succesfully changed internal flash drive to mSATA or SATA drive?

If so, how it went?

 

Thanks!

 

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[tinman 1,070]

that's right, the drive SN is being used for lot of things, cloud backup, even access, so it is important to low level clone the device (SN, manufacturer, name). 

 

Afaik is not possible to use ssd, it is defferent type of device, so lot of low level calls end up in nirvana.

Years ago i did patched some bins and changed scripts, to get specific firmware working in VM (with HC2 z-wave board connected via usb), it was for dev purpose only (to have HC2 always with me), useless for typical use (due to missing fw update capability and later cloud backups).

Different mainboard is possible, however you have to clone the LAN adapter MAC. As the supported boards are limited by the available LAN drivers, one can't use any mainboard.

 

I'm sure one can still buy some spare parts from Fibaro (z-wave board and SLC, maybe even mainboard), on the other hand it is generally possible to read back the AVR and z-wave chip, to be able to restore them.

 

 

 

[Ondrej Bajer 2]

UPDATE:

Transfer from USB Flash to mSATA SSD went OK.

Now, the primary HC2 is booting from 1TB Samsung Evo T5 mSATA, while the secondary HC2 is booting from 512GB Kingston mSATA.

Original 2GB USB Flash drive is empty, used as a kind of HW KEY in order for backup/restore jobs to work normally.

Even the Recovery Mode and factory image restore works okay with mSATA drives.

 

Speaking of cloning original USB drive, including all the strings flashed in the IC, in order to keep HC2 alive once the original USB will die => I found that it's possible, but there's a lot of prerequisities to be met in the first place.

For example, I already killed 3 USB drives in the learning process. But that's the story for another discussion thread...

 

HC2 MotherBoard after swapping OS drive with mSATA:

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OS Drive contents: