PVE 8.1 Stuck on 'loading initial ramdisk'

[LuSiTu]

Please Help.
Hello,
very new to linux and proxmox, trying my hand with a home server, but having little joy.
The problem at hand now is the PC hanging/no web GUI, but I will give a bit of background.

I installed PVE 8.1 directly on a simple home PC (MSI Z690, i5-12600, 32gb ram, mellanox 10gbe card).
Fine.
I would like it to be a HTPC so I was trying to pass onboard gpu following some guides online.
Not very successful when I tried to have the hdmi output to show the VM.
Still everything was working fine, booting, getting on web gui so that I could try to find a way to make things working.

One day I realized the screen was hanging, wile the PC was working and the web gui was working fine. Strange, but ok.
Next day the boot was hanging and the web gui was not there anymore.
Tried to follow a few threads online:
the 2XAPIC trick is not applicable to me (https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pve-8-0-and-8-1-hangs-on-boot.137033/post-620284)
followed this, but got nowhere (https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/stuck-on-loading-initial-ramdisk.137010/post-609527)
also tried to follow this but got nowhere (https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pve-8-0-and-8-1-hangs-on-boot.137033/post-620810)
So at this point I edited my grub so to have a simple line: "silent intel_iommu=on iommu=pt" (nomodetest did nothing to change the problem)
At this point the machine booted fine. I thought I was out of the rough waters, but the web gui is not there. The address cannot be reached even if all the network parameters seem fine.
I would love to find a solution so I would be grateful for any advice on guides or solutions to follow.
I would like to stick to Proxmox as a great investment (intellectual as well) for the future, but if I can't get things workable I may need to throw in the towel.
Much appreciate any feedback or help.
Thx

PS Strange thing happened today: while trying to get the GUI to work and going nowhere, I forgot to switch off the machine and after a few hours I realized the browser connected to the web gui. Wow. But the time it takes to communicate anything is biblical. Always asking 'no connection?'
Is there anyone who could make sense of this?

 

[tim1014]

I encountered the same issue. I freshly installed Proxmox 8.2 via Ventoy, but it would get stuck at loading the init ramdisk for no apparent reason.

SPEC:

• 5900X
• 128GB @ 3200 RAM
• GTX 1066
• 2x M.2 + 1x HDD
• ASUS TUF GAMING B550M-PLUS

I tried to diagnose if there was a hardware issue by stress-testing the RAM, CPU, and GPU. Everything worked fine. I also installed Windows on the machine without any problems.

I then tried installing Debian 12, and it booted up perfectly.

At that moment, I ran out of clues as to why this was happening.

Finally, I installed Proxmox with the ZFS RAID1 option, and it booted up perfectly.

So, I guess I will stick with this ZFS setup.

I am wondering if this issue could be caused by my GPU or some UEFI/legacy compatibility issue (I had CSM disabled).

EDIT: Confirm it is boot media issue. I used another USB to create a bootable media with rufus and had no issue anymore..

 

[ikariusrb]

This appears to be an interaction between ProxMox's scripts for building it's grub/kernel boot options and ventoy. There's currently an issue open on Ventoy's github repo, but I'm leaning more towards this being an issue w ProxMox picking up some of the magic Ventoy uses to multi-boot off a USB stick and shoving it into their boot options at install time. The issue is here: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2782 - It would be really nice if the ProxMox devs could take a look and see if there's an easy fix on the ProxMox side, as ventoy is super handy and fairly widely used. There is a workaround, involving editing the boot options, and that workaround is documented in the Github issue I linked above.