Proxmox Installation vs. Ventoy

How could Proxmox boot issues be related to Ventoy?

Ventoy is a nice tool that allows you to create a nice multiboot USB pendrive that just works and is easy to use.

After initializing the pendrive, you can just copy your ISO-files to the ExFat partition of the pendrive and upon booting from this pendrive, you’ll get a nice menu of your bootable ISO-files.

I use a dual-usb pendrive from SanDisk that features USB-C as well as USB-A. And it is fast. Very nice. This pendrive usually holds various Linux ISO-images for installation and rescue-images.

I recently added the Proxmox PVE-image to give it a try in my homelab. This sounds easy: Download the ISO-file, put it on the pendrive and boot from the pendrive. Done.

Yes, the installation was quick and fine everything looked well, until the first boot presented this message:

KERNEL PANIC

Please reboot your computer.

VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

And not only on the first boot, but on every consecutive boot. So I didn’t get Proxmox PVE started at all.

The first idea was: “Well, maybe Proxmox is incompatible with the old 2014 Macbook Pro that I had chosen for my experiment.”

No, that was not the case, because an older Intel NUC showed exactly the same issue.

Starting then to dig around I found multiple hints, like “Just regenerate your initramfs.” This did not help.

And generally: The installation showed completely no errors!

I found then this thread in the Proxmox Forum.

The original poster had exactly the same issue: Kernel Panic at boot.

He found out, that there was some additional boot parameters in the GRUB-config, that was introduced by Ventoy:

linux    /boot/vmlinuz-6.14.8-2-pve root=/dev/mapper/pve-root ro rdinit=/vtoy/vtoy quiet

There shouldn’t be any rdinit=/vtoy/vtoy in this line!

So, how could we fix this?

  1. Boot your computer into GRUB and press e to edit your boot entry.
  2. Find the parameter rdinit=/vtoy/vtoy and delete it. Press <F10> to boot the present boot-entry.
  3. Login to a root shell either by using Proxmox-WebUI or the plain TTY.
  4. Edit the file /etc/default/grub.d/installer.cfg and remove the parameter rdinit=/vtoy/vtoy.
  5. Update GRUB via update-grub command.
  6. Next Reboots should be fine.

The parameter was somehow introduced via Ventoy, but didn’t find an issue at Ventoy, yet.