I've deleted the grub partition

[et1000]

Hello,

My PVE won't boot anymore.
Here's my disk layout:
- 250GB SATA M.2 for OS/rpool,
- 1TB NVMe M.2 RAID1 for VM storage.

Yesterday I was doing some cleanup on old disks I recently plugged in my server. I wanted to format them and use them for backuping.
One of them (/dev/sdb) was not an old disk, it was my rpool disk. I've formatted 2 partitions, the third one is the zfs one, which refused to format because used (hopefully).
So when I tried to reboot my server, it never came back as there is no bootable partition anymore.

I booted on a live GParted: it sees 3 partitions on the SATA M.2:
- /dev/sdb1 = filesystem unknown, 1007KiB, flag "bios_grub"
- /dev/sdb2 = filesystem unknown, 1GiB
- /dev/sdb3 = filesystem zfs, label rpool, 231.88GiB

What is the point of the 1GiB partition?
Another question, I had 2 volumes attached to this disk; local and local-zfs. Are they 2 separate partitions, or are they both in the /dev/sdb3 partition?

Here's what I'm planning to do:
- backup /dev/sdb3 to another disk: I tried with testdisk on a live GParted but I'm not sure I can read zfs.
- reinstall GRUB: how can I do that without breaking /dev/sdb3? If that's not possible, I'll install a fresh PVE and copy some configuration files from the backup I plan to do, but I'd prefer boot on the original.


Thanks for your help
Emile

 

[leesteken]

What is the point of the 1GiB partition?

It is an ESP. Search for "Changing a failed bootable device" in the manual: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_zfs
That section in the manual might also help you setup the ESP and GRUB again using proxmox-boot-tool. Assuming that you use a recent Proxmox version.

Another question, I had 2 volumes attached to this disk; local and local-zfs. Are they 2 separate partitions, or are they both in the /dev/sdb3 partition?

The 'local' storage is a directory on root filesystem, which is on the rpool (/dev/sdb3). The 'local-zfs' storage is rpool/data, which is also on the rpool (/dev/sdb3).

 

[et1000]

Hello,
Thanks, that helps. I finally managed to get my pve back!
I had to run the installer (debug mode), format the ESP partition, import the ZFS partition, chroot in the filesystem, and run proxmox-boot-tool (grub, otherwise I get a error message because of secure boot keys).

Here are the commands if someone's interested:

zpool import -f rpool -R /mnt

mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -t proc /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /run /mnt/run
mount -t sysfs /sys /mnt/sys

chroot /mnt bash

proxmox-boot-tool format /dev/sda2
proxmox-boot-tool init /dev/sda2 grub

Then reboot and zpool import -f rpool again when Busybox asks.

I also backed up some important files on an other disk before the boot reinstall:

mount /dev/sda /media/
cp -R /etc /media
cp -R /var /media

Emile