Booting PVE including VM from backup hard drive over USB

emulov

New Member
Sep 4, 2018
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Hi,

We are currently trying out Proxmox VE on an Intel NUC to virtualize our PBX VM. Everything works great so far and we think of Proxmox as a high quality and very user-friendly hypervisor.

In order to be prepared for a hard drive failure, we bought a second backup hard drive for our NUC and created an exact clone using CloneZilla. When using the backup hard drive internally instead of the original one, everything works perfectly, just as expected. This way, on a hard drive failure, we can simply insert the other drive without having to reinstall Proxmox and migrate the PBX VM. The NUC not having RAID, this solution is good enough for our PBX.

Now, we also tried booting up PVE and the PBX VM from the backup drive over USB (using a SATA III to USB adapter) in two scenarios:

1. On the original machine, namely the Intel NUC.
2. On a different machine with completely different hardware

In both cases, the machine boots up fine and reaches the PVE login shell. However, in the former case, the network works and the Proxmox web interface is reachable but the PBX VM does not boot up. The error message is, that the VM's hard disk file cannot be found in /etc/pve. Why is that?

In the latter case, Proxmox VE is not even reachable over the network and ping fails as well. We assume it is because the NIC of the other machine is a different one and the driver might not have been loaded/installed. Also, it may be because Proxmox links the IP configuration only to the original NIC and when booting up an already configured PVE instance, the network settings have to be adjusted on the new machine.

The question now is what exactly the problem is in these two individual cases and if it is possible to successfully boot PVE including the VM in either or both of these cases and what steps are required to take to reach that goal.

Thanks for your help!
 

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