VMs unable to start up "qcow2 does not exist".

[Bazzyi]

I recently decided to restart my proxmox instance so I shutdown all my ubuntu VMs using "shutdown now". After my proxmox rebooted, none of the VMs seem to be able to startup now, giving me the error "TASK ERROR: volume 'Storage:1xx/vm-1xx-disk-0.qcow2' does not exist".

All my VMs are stored on my boot SSD as I don't have any other drives that I can use.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

 

[Chris]

Hi,
could you please share your storage configuration cat /etc/pve/storage.cfg and the output of pvesm list Storage. The error indicates that the VM disk was not found on the expected storage. Did you move the disk in the past? Is the VM config not reflecting the current storage state?

 

[blazer232]

Hi there! Apologies for hijacking/necroing this thread, but I've just run into the same exact issue as OP. My TrueNAS VM suddenly stopped running and when I attempt to relaunch it, it throws the error "TASK ERROR: volume 'SG16TB:102/vm-102-disk-0.qcow2' does not exist."

I recently rebuilt my machine, including new storage for the OS, and had to backup/import all of my VMs. Everything seemed to be working as intended for a while until just this evening when I encountered this issue. There's now several TB of files which are seemingly missing; I'm hoping they can be recovered.

Here's my storage config:

dir: local
        path /var/lib/vz
        content iso,backup,vztmpl

zfspool: local-zfs
        pool rpool/data
        content rootdir,images
        sparse 1

dir: SG16TB
        path /mnt/pve/SG16TB
        content vztmpl,snippets,rootdir,backup,iso,images
        prune-backups keep-all=1
        shared 1

Here's the output of pvesm list SG16TB:

Volid Format  Type      Size VMID

 

[gfngfn256]

What does ls /mnt/pve/SG16TB/images show?

 

[blazer232]

What does ls /mnt/pve/SG16TB/images show?

Appears to be empty.

 

[gfngfn256]

What does ls /mnt/pve/SG16TB show?

 

[blazer232]

What does ls /mnt/pve/SG16TB show?

dump images private snippets template

 

[gfngfn256]

So it appears you've somehow deleted the VM's disk images. Your probably going to have to revert to restoring from backups.
Since this appears to be a mounted directory (as it is in the /mnt directory) - what is the source of this ? Another disk/NAS/NFS etc?

 

[blazer232]

So it appears you've somehow deleted the VM's disk images. Your probably going to have to revert to restoring from backups.
Since this appears to be a mounted directory (as it is in the /mnt directory) - what is the source of this ? Another disk/NAS/NFS etc?

I was using this drive for TrueNAS, it had my main tank on it. Unfortunately my latest backup is several months out of date. Lesson learned there, I suppose, but I still don't understand how my disk image was deleted, completely spontaneously? I was working earlier in the day trying to get some containers up and running but wasn't doing anything with that particular disk, as it does nothing but serve as NAS storage.

 

[gfngfn256]

I was using this drive for TrueNAS

Not sure what "this drive" refers to. Is that bare-metal TrueNAS or a VM within PVE? Your going to have to check into TrueNAS data recovery. Snapshots possibly?

my latest backup is several months out of date

Unforgivable in any setup. I hope the data is re-constructable.

 

[blazer232]

Not sure what "this drive" refers to. Is that bare-metal TrueNAS or a VM within PVE? Your going to have to check into TrueNAS data recovery. Snapshots possibly?

Unforgivable in any setup. I hope the data is re-constructable.

"This drive" refers to "SG16TB," it was a 16TB HDD I was using as storage in a TrueNAS VM within Proxmox. I've been slowly but surely working toward eventually replacing it with a baremetal machine, but of course these things take time and money. I know not keeping consistent backups is a total screwup on my part, I just don't currently have the storage space to support a backup for all of the data I was storing.

This whole project started out as a franken-PC made from a lot of secondhand hardware, it used to be just a Windows OS running everything (Plex, Perforce, game servers, etc.) before this Proxmox stuff was kind of forcibly thrust upon me, I won't bore you with the details about that situation but it's been quite a learning curve that I've had to surmount in a very short amount of time; there's quite a few gaps in my research that still need to be filled, so I'm appreciative of any and all tips or advice you can give me so I can avoid situations like this in the future (other than the obvious, i.e. keeping regular backups).