Proxmox fails to boot when an empty NVME drive is removed

biglyweenis

New Member
Jul 16, 2023
1
0
1
Hello!

I am having an issue with proxmox failing to boot properly when I remove an empty M.2 NVME drive. For context, I have the proxmox host OS and its associated boot partitions on a different SSD, with my VMs being stored on another M.2 NVME. I had been running Ubuntu and virtualizing machines by KVM, so I wanted to move those from that drive to the new M.2 (hence having two M.2 drives). I moved everything without issues and so I wanted to remove the no longer needed drive - however, this is the one that seems to be necessary.

Here is the output of lsblk, I have a few spinning drives that I don't think are relevant. nvme1n1 is the drive I cannot seem to remove.

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 7.3T 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 16M 0 part /mnt/pve/test
└─sda2 8:2 0 7.3T 0 part /mnt/HDD
sdb 8:16 0 1.8T 0 disk /mnt/tempHDD
sdc 8:32 0 223.6G 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 0 1007K 0 part
├─sdc2 8:34 0 1G 0 part /boot/efi
└─sdc3 8:35 0 222.6G 0 part
├─pve-swap 253:0 0 8G 0 lvm [SWAP]
└─pve-root 253:1 0 214.6G 0 lvm /
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
nvme0n1 259:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─VMs-VMs_tmeta 253:2 0 9.3G 0 lvm
│ └─VMs-VMs-tpool 253:4 0 912.8G 0 lvm
│ ├─VMs-VMs 253:5 0 912.8G 1 lvm
│ ├─VMs-vm--100--disk--0 253:6 0 256G 0 lvm
│ ├─VMs-vm--101--disk--0 253:7 0 4M 0 lvm
│ ├─VMs-vm--101--disk--1 253:8 0 256G 0 lvm
│ └─VMs-vm--102--disk--0 253:9 0 8G 0 lvm
└─VMs-VMs_tdata 253:3 0 912.8G 0 lvm
└─VMs-VMs-tpool 253:4 0 912.8G 0 lvm
├─VMs-VMs 253:5 0 912.8G 1 lvm
├─VMs-vm--100--disk--0 253:6 0 256G 0 lvm
├─VMs-vm--101--disk--0 253:7 0 4M 0 lvm
├─VMs-vm--101--disk--1 253:8 0 256G 0 lvm
└─VMs-vm--102--disk--0 253:9 0 8G 0 lvm
nvme1n1 259:1 0 931.5G 0 disk

I have seen this reddit thread which seems to indicate that maybe the EFI partition is set up incorrectly, but I don't think so. lsblk indicates that the EFI partition is where it should be. I can get into grub just fine, and have tried booting in both normal and recovery mode. Neither work, but recovery mode seems to get slightly further, I could transcribe the TTY text as it boot if that would help. TTY stops updating after a few lines even in a normal boot for me, I think this is because I have disabled the GPU drivers for PCI passthrough?

I have tried wipefs to make sure nothing is on the drive, although I don't think it did anything. I tried putting another M.2 in the same slot as the misbehaving drive, also no luck. I have tried swapping disks around a few times, played around with the bios boot settings as well as CPU virtualization settings. I don't know why, but I know for sure that the system boots properly with the nvme1n1 M.2 in place, and doesn't when its removed.

At this point I don't know what to try! I'd appreciate any suggestions, I certainly am not an expert with linux or proxmox, and this is the first issue I couldn't solve by googling or that wasn't already documented on this forum (that I could find).

Thanks!
 

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