Recently, when I reboot my Proxmox hardware, I'm greeted with this message after the bootloader splash screen. It won't progress any further, even after letting it sit overnight.
But restarting it 5-10 times will eventually get past it.
I suspect it might have something to do with me passing a physical disk and the whole GPU to a Windows VM (my temp solution for TV gaming until I can get Sunshine issues ironed out) but I'm not sure where to start looking for the issue.
I thought it might be freezing when the VM tries to take control of the GPU, but with a continuous ping to both the server and the VM, I never get a response. That makes me think the issue is happening before the VM is started.
I'm basically just hoping someone could point me to a log that might have a related error message.
This seems like a hardware problem. Hardware freezes would not be caused by hardware pass through to VMs. Test your RAM. Check for loose PCI cards, etc.
I feel like it's unlikely to be a hardware issue unless the drive Proxmox is on is dying. SMART is fine, but it's on an SSD that's nearly 15 years old, so it very well might be the cause. I need to migrate it to one of my nvme disks eventually.
But, I can boot into the Windows physical disk just fine (instead of booting into Proxmox and running it as a VM). Same with a live ISO on USB.
The fact that it's perfectly stable after I do get it to boot is why I'm chasing down a software issue first. I also don't want to think about the cost of having to replace hardware yet. But I'm definitely not ruling it out completely.
I'm going to take the advice of another commenter and turn off quiet in grub so I can get a better look at what's actually going on under the hood.
this can't be a hardware problem other than the power supply, because judging by the screenshot, the disks have already been initialized, which means the entire kernel has loaded into RAM and even libraries have started loading. first you need to read dmesg and check exactly where the log stopped. rather than testing everything.
Respectfully, you and I are basing our feedback on incomplete information. That being said, it absolutely could be a hardware problem because the further get into the boot process, more data is loaded from disk into RAM. There isn’t some point beyond which hardware is no longer a concern.
Your point about dmesg is a valid one, provided you can even get to a login prompt. Otherwise, you’re captive to the terminal output on boot.
I reserve the right to be wrong, but my money is on bad RAM. If one wants to test the hardware without taking things apart, booting to a live USB/CD is a good option.
Are you sure you're passing your gpu through correctly? This didn't happen to me, but a buddy of mine didn't do iommu and tried to pass the gpu through to a VM, and he couldn't boot either. If you boot rescue and change the VM to not start-up on boot? I would definitely post your grub boot line.
It could totally be a hardware issue. I've seen something similar happen because the temperature cycles caused the RAM to wiggle out of the slot a bit, but it wasn't far enough to cause issues until the stick heated up and got pushed a little further out.
I don't think it's likely to be a hardware issue unless it's a faulty drive, but I can't rule out other components until I can see some errors.