Fresh Start on a 120GB Drive
After the 2TB drive died and I’d finished mourning my Proxmox config, the question was simple: what now?
The answer was also simple, but I resisted it for a full evening because I’m stubborn. Ubuntu wouldn’t work. I asked. The internet confirmed it. Proxmox is built on Debian, and there is no supported path from Ubuntu to Proxmox — the kernel packages fight the package manager, and the first apt upgrade would break everything. The internet was right, as usual, and I wasted an evening discovering that.
Debian it is
Debian 12 Bookworm. Netboot.xyz for the install — boot from the network, pick the OS from a menu, let it download and install. The installer asks which disk to use, and this was the one decision that actually mattered: the 120GB Kingston SSD, not the dying 2TB Seagate.
Guided partitioning, entire disk, single partition. Software selection: uncheck everything. No desktop, no GNOME, no printing support. Just the base system. SSH and Proxmox would come after.
The install took fifteen minutes. GRUB went to the SSD’s MBR. I set a root password, created a user, rebooted.
Proxmox on top
Debian to Proxmox is one command:
“bash`
apt install proxmox-ve
Add the repository first, then install. Proxmox boots, shows a web interface at https://
The 2TB Seagate stays in the box as scratch storage. I don’t trust it with anything important, but for throwaway test VMs it’s fine. Every time I create a VM on it, I name it something like “temp-testing-dont-care” as a reminder.
What I actually learned
The whole reinstall — from “the box is dead” to “Proxmox is running and VMs are deploying” — took about ninety minutes. The recovery attempt that preceded it took three hours. The lesson is obvious: sometimes the fastest path through a problem is the one you skip first because it feels like giving up.
Fresh installs are underrated. They’re the only time you get to make every decision correctly from the start, without the weight of choices you made months ago when you didn’t know what you were doing.