Installing Proxmox

Introduction

I know that installing proxmox is straight forward. First, burning the image on a usb and then booting from a server or laptop , then follwoing the installation steps. Unfortunately, I tried to do that on my HP pavillion laptop and I was getting a black page with “GRUB” word appering in the upper left corner. I tried burning the usb with different softwares and also with different operating systems but the same black page was appearing. So, in this blog I will show you how I solved this issue, and successfully installed proxmox.

Requirments

• Virtual Box
• USB to SATA cable
• Hard Drive
• Laptop

Solving the issue

1- What I did? I first installed a vm proxmox on Virtual Box with the following specfications:

• vdi hard drive
• 1 core CPU
• 1024 memory

2- After fininshing the installation I cloned the image into a raw format with the VBoxManage CLI.

VBoxManage clonehd proxmox.vdi proxmox.img --format RAW

3- Next I burned the proxmox.img on my hard drive with dd. Here is how:

• Finded the hard drive name thru diskutil list. Which is /dev/disk2
• Formated the disk diskutil eraseDisk FREE pve /dev/disk2
• Then purned proxmox to the hard drive sudo dd if=proxmox.img of=/dev/disk2

4- Connected the hard drive to my laptop and finally it worked!. But now I faced an issue with the volume sizes which where too small according to my sda 750GB hard drive. Specially the two logical volumes: pve-root = 1.8GB which contains the iso files and pve-data=2.3GB which will have the VMs data .

root@home-vm:~# lsblk
NAME               MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda                  8:0    0 698.7G  0 disk 
├─sda1               8:1    0     1M  0 part 
├─sda2               8:2    0   256M  0 part 
└─sda3               8:3    0   7.8G  0 part 
├─pve-swap         253:0    0   896M  0 lvm  [SWAP]
├─pve-root         253:1    0   1.8G  0 lvm  /
├─pve-data_tmeta   253:2    0     1G  0 lvm  
│ └─pve-data       253:4    0   2.3G  0 lvm  
└─pve-data_tdata   253:3    0   2.3G  0 lvm  
    └─pve-data     253:4    0   2.3G  0 lvm  

To increase there size, enter the console of the proxmox and do the following:

apt-get install parted
parted /dev/sda 

(parted) print
Warning: Not all of the space available to /dev/vda appears to be used, you can
fix the GPT to use all of the space (an extra 1448371952 blocks) or continue
with the current setting? 
Fix/Ignore? F 

resizepart 3 100%
quit

Now sda3 free size is larger

fdisk -l /dev/sda | grep ^/dev

/dev/sda1    2048       4095       2048     1M BIOS boot
/dev/sda2    4096     528383     524288   256M EFI System
/dev/sda3  528384 1465149134 1464620751 698.4G Linux LVM

before:

fdisk -l /dev/sda | grep ^/dev

/dev/sda1    2048     4095     2048    1M BIOS boot
/dev/sda2    4096   528383   524288  256M EFI System
/dev/sda3  528384 16777182 16248799  7.8G Linux LVM

Then after increasing the hard drive, increase the logical volumes:

lvresize --size +40G --resizefs /dev/pve/root
lvresize --size +5G --resizefs /dev/pve/swap
lvresize --size +200G --resizefs /dev/pve/data

root@home-vm:~# lsblk

├─pve-swap                     253:0    0   5.9G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
├─pve-root                     253:1    0  41.8G  0 lvm  /
....
    ├─pve-data                 253:5    0 202.3G  0 lvm  

Finally pve-swap, pve-root, pve-data LVS increased. Hope this will help others!.