Well I have now had success but using Balena Etcher and then doing some editing.
I downloaded the xz file relating to 64bit recommended version and ran unxz to decompress it.
Then I used etcher to write it to the sd card.
After that I remounted it so I had access to bootfs and rootfs
I left the user as pi but I did an edit of /etc/shadow'
In it this was what it showed for pi
So to make sure it had a valid salt for the password for pi I copied the same portion from my laptop and replaced the ! with it.
I created an empty ssh file to allow me to ssh into it.
It moaned about the key as I expected so I used the suggested key gen to remove it and tried again. That got me in so I could run raspi-config to expand the file system and set the correct country code and make sure the time zone is correct.
Now it is connect to my lan by ethernet so now I can configure the wifi as a hotspot again.
I hope this helps anyone else who's stuck
I downloaded the xz file relating to 64bit recommended version and ran unxz to decompress it.
Then I used etcher to write it to the sd card.
After that I remounted it so I had access to bootfs and rootfs
I left the user as pi but I did an edit of /etc/shadow'
In it this was what it showed for pi
( don't know why the 20426 bit looks out of place!)pi:!0:99999:7:::
0:99999:7:::So to make sure it had a valid salt for the password for pi I copied the same portion from my laptop and replaced the ! with it.
I created an empty ssh file to allow me to ssh into it.
It moaned about the key as I expected so I used the suggested key gen to remove it and tried again. That got me in so I could run raspi-config to expand the file system and set the correct country code and make sure the time zone is correct.
Now it is connect to my lan by ethernet so now I can configure the wifi as a hotspot again.
I hope this helps anyone else who's stuck
Statistics: Posted by buteman — Sat Dec 27, 2025 1:48 pm