Service start commands fail on pve-cluster with

[main] notice: unable to acquire pmxcfs lock - trying again

Proxmox VE 8.1

I had that too... I had to use this and it worked:

killall pmxcfs
sleep 30

Basically, you need to stop the previously started `pmxcfs'.

This is what the script would look like:

#/bin/bash -xe
systemctl stop corosync.service
systemctl stop pve-cluster.service
systemctl stop corosync
systemctl stop pve-cluster

pmxcfs -l
rm /etc/pve/corosync.conf
rm /etc/corosync/*
rm /var/lib/corosync/*

# This could be to destructive, I would recommend to delete the folders manually
# rm -rf /etc/pve/nodes/*

killall pmxcfs
sleep 30

systemctl start pve-cluster
systemctl start corosync
systemctl start pve-cluster.service
systemctl start corosync.service

Another version I found online looked like this:

#/bin/bash -xe

systemctl stop pvestatd.service
systemctl stop pvedaemon.service
systemctl stop pve-cluster.service
systemctl stop corosync
systemctl stop pve-cluster

sqlite3 /var/lib/pve-cluster/config.db "delete from tree where name = 'corosync.conf';"

pmxcfs -l
rm /etc/pve/corosync.conf
rm /etc/corosync/*
rm /var/lib/corosync/*
rm -rf /etc/pve/nodes/*

killall pmxcfs
sleep 30

systemctl start pve-cluster
systemctl start corosync
systemctl start pve-cluster.service
systemctl start pvedaemon.service
systemctl start pvestatd.service

this is dangerous ... DO NOT TRY THIS WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

plz include the steps to backup the files or move the fils to different location rather deleting

Yeah, RIP my VMs 😢 Careful as you go!