HELP! My Proxmox installation has failed

[danwtsa]

Hello... my Proxmox installation has failed and I need help recovering it! I'm not sure where to start.

This morning I couldn't access anything and this is what the hosting company gave me

Server is accessible over ssh but pve-cluster isn't running.
root@server:~# systemctl status pve-cluster
× pve-cluster.service - The Proxmox VE cluster filesystem
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/pve-cluster.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Thu 2025-07-24 07:45:52 EDT; 2h 49min ago
Process: 2720 ExecStart=/usr/bin/pmxcfs (code=exited, status=255/EXCEPTION)
CPU: 11ms

Jul 24 07:45:52 server systemd[1]: pve-cluster.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at>
Jul 24 07:45:52 server systemd[1]: Stopped pve-cluster.service - The Proxmox VE cluster filesystem.
Jul 24 07:45:52 server systemd[1]: pve-cluster.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Jul 24 07:45:52 server systemd[1]: pve-cluster.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jul 24 07:45:52 server systemd[1]: Failed to start pve-cluster.service - The Proxmox VE cluster file>
lines 1-11/11 (END)

Can anyone give me a hand with this?

Dan Lewis

 

[Impact]

Please use code blocks when sharing code, logs or command outputs so the formatting is preserved and it looks nice.
Check journalctl -ru pve-cluster. There might be a lot of repeated messages, just scroll down until you see something relevant.

 

[danwtsa]

Where is that file located on the server?

 

[Impact]

It's a command, not a file.

 

[danwtsa]

it appears that snapshots have filled up my hard drive. I used zfs list -t snapshot to list them. How can I safely delete them so I can gain enough disk space to have my web gui start again?

 

[Impact]

It would help a lot if you would share what you see. Since qm will not work right now you'll have to use zfs destroy ...@... and then remove the now invalid snapshot entry from the guest's config file later.