Z-Wave Ghost Removal pre C8 Migration

I have (had) a number of ghost z-wave devices on my C7, and was told that they can have an effect on migration to the C8.
The other day I started with 10, and now have reduced it to 3 (which are being very stubborn).

Any advice on easily getting them removed?



At this point, I have no idea what the original devices were.
Refresh and Remove seems to do nothing.

0x13 is definitely still powered up. You can take your hub elsewhere (a friends house) then do the remove. (not the hex numbers and make sure the hub is on dhcp so you can work elsewhere) then do the remove. If that doesn't work you will need a z-wave stick paired as a secondary controller to remove them.

I don't know if this will work for you or even if all steps are necessary, but this worked for me:

  1. Do a backup, then a soft reset and restore.
  2. Do a shutdown and remove power for 10 minutes.
  3. If ghosts are still there, click the REMOVE button like 5 times on each ghost.
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WHen you say still powered up, you mean it is still a device on the system?
Are there any ways to identify it?

You can try by class.

  1. Do a backup, then a soft reset and restore.
    Soft reset and restore - does this wipe the hub? Might be too stressful for me

  2. Do a shutdown and remove power for 10 minutes.

  3. If ghosts are still there, click the REMOVE button like 5 times on each ghost.

I would gladly power on the devices again if I could determine what they were

The power up/down I'm referring to is the hub not the device(s).

A minute or so should be plenty of time for power removed, AFAIK.

What about the soft reset step. Little nervous about doing that.

Soft reset really can't hurt anything -basically you download a local backup that will contain the hubs database (which can clean up any issues that might be existing in the database), do the soft reset, and then restore the backup you downloaded. You end up back where you started, and any odd jumbles that might have been in your database should be gone. Of course, if your database is already OK, nothing will change.

https://docs2.hubitat.com/en/user-interface/advanced-features/soft-reset

For the soft reset/restore you can now (since a few major versions ago) just create a backup and then immediately restore it. When you do a restore it automatically does a soft reset first. Skips having to go into the diagnostic tool that way. If you want to clear all past logs, you need to go through the diagnostic tool.

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True - forgot about that! :slight_smile: