Problem moving PVE from one motherboard to another

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Meikel

New Member
Dec 15, 2025
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I'm quite the Linux amateur so please don't expect too much from me.

I recently ordered a new motherboard to move my server setup to because (who would've guessed) the ultra cheap x99 board from china was actually very cheap in quality and caused a lot of system instabilities.

Yesterday I moved all my parts from one motherboard to a new (used) supermicro board (with 2x10g yey).

Sadly I can no longer boot into PVE. The system starts "loading initramfs" and then randomly stops at some point (see attachments).

PVE is/was installed on a zfs pool with 2 500gb SSDs (raid 1)

I tried the following:
* Found a faulty memory stick and removed it
* Removed all the HDDs+data expansion card and only attach the two SSDs
* booted from PVE installation ISO via thumb drive to apply suggestions from this wiki page: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Recover_From_Grub_Failure
* tried rescue mode from USB thumb drive => no device detected
* I tried `nomodeset acpi=off` in grub as suggested by a friend
* Reset BIOS to "optimized defaults"

I don't think the motherboard is broken as I can boot into any OS via thumb stick.
I do NOT get any logs/output except the logs shown in my screenshots. Thus it's very hard too Google this issue myself.

I hope you guys can help me.
 

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Could you please make a video of the boot process? Did the previous board had some sort of hardware-raid enabled without you knowing by any chance?
 
No I don't think the previous board was capable of doing hardware raid.

Before I record a video:
I tried another suggestion from a friend and put emergency in the kernel args which worked as expected: I get a root prompt to execute some commands.

From what I can see the zfs pool + datasets are not mounted. I don' t know whether this is due to the emergency mode.

I attached two more images with the grub config and a lsblk

In the emergency mode I ran update-grub and proxmox-boot-tool reinit which caused the grub config to slightly alter (hd9 changed to hd0). But no progress sadly.

Does this help in any way? I assume it's not a hardware issue.
 

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Update:
I tried another 2 mainboards (Biostar + ASUS - both gaming devices) and both BIOS/UEFI do not detect any of those two zfs raid1 ssds as bootable - they are detected but not an option to boot from.

I also installed a new pve on another pair of ssds (zfs raid1) and I tried to compare the grub configs but didn't see any obvious change
 
I somewhat suspect that the error is just within the ZFS-Import while booting the system. Did you try booting with a Proxmox-ISO into Rescue Mode (with shell + zfs tools) to import the pool manually?
 
After more testing i think the issue that the ssds are not bootable is probably because I installed it in legacy mode.
I booted in resuce mode from the iso on a USB thumb drive and made it UEFI capable which seems to work.

However when I boot into rescue mode the ZFS pool rpool is not mounted (imported?) automatically and when I run proxmox-boot-tool refresh I get a warning that it can't find the initrd files. I can post a screenshot if you need the excat issue.
 
Meikel said:
After more testing i think the issue that the ssds are not bootable is probably because I installed it in legacy mode.
I booted in resuce mode from the iso on a USB thumb drive and made it UEFI capable which seems to work.

However when I boot into rescue mode the ZFS pool rpool is not mounted (imported?) automatically and when I run proxmox-boot-tool refresh I get a warning that it can't find the initrd files. I can post a screenshot if you need the excat issue.
Click to expand...

You dont want to use proxmox-boot-tool at that point. You can just import the ZFS-Pool manually via cli.
 
Yes I can import the zpool but that doesnt help. After a reboot the pool is not mounted (I assume) because the kernel is not loaded (that is what a friend assumes)
 
Here is some info after booting into the debug shell. Rescue shell does not work because it cant find any bootable devices or something similar
 

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Last edited:
That's the thing: It doesn't work. All changes are "reverted" after rebooting. I don't know if they are not applied or discarded. I also tried to install grub-efi-amd64 but that wasn't persisted as well. So something's off
 
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