A quick strategy to get Proxmox to let you upload disk images to Thin-LVM volumes

So, a little background:

1. In Proxmox you have local mounted storage on each of your nodes.
2. You also have Thin-LVM volumes, which are an abstraction layer sitting on top of physical hardware; so like /dev/sdb isn’t the actual volume, it’s just the block storage for the thinly provisioned LVM volume.
3. You can put images there, but you can’t overwrite them to replace them if, for example, you have a raw disk image you’re trying to replace it with (because Proxmox doesn’t let you upload disk images sort-of directly) or let you refer to them directly when you’re creating a VM in the GUI.

So now what?

1. Create a VM using the local storage, not your LVM-Thin directory.
2. Use SCP to upload the image to ‘/mnt/pve/<node>/images/<number>/
3. SSH into the server and go to the same directory; you’ll probably see two images, one named as ‘vm-<number>-disk-0.raw’ and one with your original name.
   1. If you made an EFI disk, expect there to be a vmdk, qcow2, or other image there. Don’t touch that one.
4. Delete the original disk and rename the other to its name.
5. Use qm rescan to rescan the drive image, and you should be good.
6. Boot the new volume.

In theory, anyway. You probably are going to get Not Found and Access Denied errors in the EFI loader when you try this. Here’s a list of the things I tried to get it working, and eventually did:

1. Turn off Secure Boot in the VM’s BIOS.
2. Add Boot Option to find the file itself.
3. Choose a SATA disk (not sure if this helped or not)
4. Delete, then readd, an EFI partition on the local storage with the .vmdk itself.
5. Try this a few times until some mysterious combination works.

Good luck…