I recently tried installing the latest Proxmox VE 9.2.1 on my trusty MSI Z97 PC Mate motherboard, and it turned into an absolute nightmare. First, the installer flat out crashed with an unable to install initramfs error.

To fix it, I had to dig through the absolute dumbest BIOS layout in existence. On this motherboard, Secure Boot is completely hidden. I had to go to Settings ➔ Advanced ➔ Windows OS Configuration, turn on the Windows 8/8.1 Feature, and only then did the secret Secure Boot submenu pop up so I could finally disable it.

I wiped the disk and tried again, but immediately hit a new roadblock: installation of package pve-i18n... failed. It turns “out the modern Proxmox kernel sends power management and queuing commands that older Z97 SATA controllers just can’t keep up with, causing the target drive to drop offline mid-installation.” Source less claim, tiss a theory AI suggested.

The ultimate fix? I bypassed the hardware’s native command queuing entirely. At the Proxmox boot menu, I pressed e to edit the installer parameters, found the linux boot line, and appended these specific kernel safe-flags to the very end of it:

intel_iommu=on iommu=pt libata.force=noncq pci=nomsi