[SOLVED] Just updated, no longer booting, stuck at "loading initial ramdisk"

[proxcub]

I've been running Proxmox for the last few months without issue. I applied the latest update last night and now Proxmox refuses to boot any futher than "Loading initial ramdisk"

Naturally I googled what that means and it seems a few people have been stuck at this point before, yet not of the solutions offered were relevant to me (ie. new hardware conflict) or a solution that I'm already using (use legacy mode instead of UEFI)

I'm at a loss as to what is causing this issue now after it's been running so smoothly for months.

 

[Chris]

Have you tried to boot the previous kernel? Does the issue persist also with that? What hardware are you running on?

 

[proxcub]

Yep, first thing I tried was to use previous kernels. Still no go. I'm running Proxmox on a Gigabyte H270N motheboard with an i5-7500

 

[Chris]

Where exactly does the boot hang and what's the file system of your root partition? Any recent BIOS updates? You might try https://wiki.debian.org/InitramfsDebug

 

[proxcub]

Boot hangs at "loading initial ramdisk" ... I'm not a debian expert but I left Proxmox on default when installing so I think that would be ext4. Nope, no BIOS update or anything different. I just simply ran the latest update through the Proxmox GUI and then after a reboot it wouldn't start.. I plugged in a monitor to see what the problem was and that's the only thing I can see. No error, nothing .. just stuck at "loading initial ramdisk"

 

[Chris]

You can try to get to a rescue shell as mentioned by the provided link. If you can't reach a rescue shell your initramfs is probably corrupt.

 

[proxcub]

Assuming it's corrupt as you say since I was unable to boot into rescue shell. Is there a way to reinstall Proxmox without losing all VM and LXC data on the disk?

 

[Chris]

You can try to boot into the rescue mode from CD, using the proxmox iso.

 

[proxcub]

Just an update: I tried absolutely everything I could think of. As a last resort, I decided to run a system diagnostic. Turns out one single 16GB RAM had decided to give up the ghost, it was throwing over 7 million errors. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself. Brand new builds or new modules, sure, I come across faulty RAM many times. Even just removing a stick and putting into another machine, sometimes just the act of moving it from one to another could upset it. but in all my 25+ years of computing, I've never once seen a RAM module throw errors that had been working perfectly undisturbed for almost a year. So there we have it, put in some new RAM and it's up and running again.

Thanks for all your help Chris. I thought I would post an update just in case someone else comes across this problem of their system failing at "loading initial ramdisk" ... check your RAM! "

 

[Chris]

Thank you for the update, happy to hear that you are up and running again!