ProxMox will not boot after environment power failure

[Dead-ProxMox-On-A-NUC]

Hi, I've been running Proxmox successfully on an Intel NUC for several weeks with no problems. Unfortunately there was a power disruption, and now Proxmox appears to hang on boot.

System Specification:

* Intel NUC NUC5PPYH
* 8GB DDR3L SODIMM
* 480GB SSD
* ProxMox VE 4.2

The boot passes through GRUB successfully and begins launching ProxMox and then hangs on this error:

systemd-sysv-generator[238]: Ignoring creation of an alias umountiscsi.service for itself
​

I'm able to boot various rescue CD's and things but the cause of the fault is not apparent to me. Where does ProxMox store the VM images so I can extract them, if I need to simply blow the disk away? The 4.2VE installer seems to lack a repair option, and the error is too vague for me to see a clear path to manual recovery.

Is there a repair tool for ProxMox anywhere?

 

[Dead-ProxMox-On-A-NUC]

No response from the support community, but I was able to determine the answers for myself.

1) There is no repair option for Proxmox. If the install has any issues you need to blow away the entire volume it resides on including the VM data. If you use ProxMox, backups are critical due to lack of reliability/recoverability.

2) VMs are stored in an LVM under /dev/sda (/dev/sda3 in my case) on a single block device system, but due to specific peculiarities with the storage format ProxMox uses, it's not possible to extract or recover the disk even if you can mount these volumes.

It's a good concept for a product, but it's just not workable yet for any kind of production environment. I've blown away the disk and am now going through the process of rebuilding VMs and restoring from backup.

Lack of community support is also disappointing. I hope the information I've supplied here can be of assistance to other users.

 

[tom]

No response from the support community, but I was able to determine the answers for myself.

1) There is no repair option for Proxmox. If the install has any issues you need to blow away the entire volume it resides on including the VM data. If you use ProxMox, backups are critical due to lack of reliability/recoverability.

You can boot the ISO installer in debug mode. You can also boot any other linux live cd. But as it seems you lost data you need to re-install. Your desktop system hardware is not suited for servers.

Please note, there is a reason why you should use powerloss protecting on hard disk, raid controllers, ecc memory and other measures to prevent data loss.

A Intel NUC is a great device for playing around, but probably not for servers with data protection needs.

2) VMs are stored in an LVM under /dev/sda (/dev/sda3 in my case) on a single block device system, but due to specific peculiarities with the storage format ProxMox uses, it's not possible to extract or recover the disk even if you can mount these volumes.

Proxmox VE use several well documented storage formats, and its possible to extract data. So what you state here is just not true. And a backup of your VMs can be easiliy restored.

Start reading here:
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Backup_and_Restore

It's a good concept for a product, but it's just not workable yet for any kind of production environment. I've blown away the disk and am now going through the process of rebuilding VMs and restoring from backup.

Instead of blaming the project and the community, please use a server hardware, make yourself confident with the basic software and concepts of data security of harddisk and you will have a very reliable setup.

Lack of community support is also disappointing. I hope the information I've supplied here can be of assistance to other users.

Our community is great, but if your first step is to telling that its bad you probably will not motivate other to give you a warm welcome.

 

[mir]

Our community is great, but if your first step is to telling that its bad you probably will not motivate other to give you a warm welcome.

And may I add to this that making a request on a Saturday and already the day after on a Sunday less than 24 hours after the initial request when no one has replied already blame the community for being unhelpful is absurd.

 

[mac86]

I'm new with proxmox.
I've installed Proxmox 6.2 on Sun Server 7110 (hardware raid LSI interface).

Everything works very well, how ever, after a power loss,
Proxmox won't boot anymore.

It passes Grub screen, but on next seconds, I get black screen
and no reply from keyboard or monitor.

Then, I've tried boot from proxmox USB rescue mode and again: black
screen after grub.

Finnaly I've installed debian 10, and sadly abandon proxmox.
Debian 10, haven't problem with power failuer issues.

Any ideas ?