Upgrading Proxmox 8 to 9 on Macbook Pro 2015

I run proxmox 8 on an old 2015 ish Macbook Pro. 16GB memory, silent, 500GB SSD, it’s a good machine. When Proxmox 9 came out, I wanted to upgrade it to 9. Proxmox has an upgrade guide. Followed it, everything went fine. After reboot and upon ssh, I realized, root was mounted read-only.¹

A dmesg check revealed that there were a lot of hard disk read errors. Strange I thought. LLMs said the nvme drives on those machines were not so great and that it was probably failing and it failed now. I wasn’t so sure. After a few cleanups and reboots, I decided to use CloneZilla to image the original Mac OS I’d saved. Interestingly, restore succeeded without any issues. Now, Clonezilla is all linux and if it was able to first run without issues and succeed in cloning, the mac ssd wasn’t the issue.

Thinking perhaps the upgrade was the issue, I used the Proxmox 9 ISO to do a full and new install. Midway through the installation, I began to get write errors. That was confounding!

So after some thinking, I tried to install Ubuntu 24.x, same issue. Lastly, I ran the Proxmox 8 install, it installed flawlessly. Then I knew it was a kernel/drivers etc. issue. Took half a day but I’m back using the Proxmox server on my trusty macbook pro.

Learnings - Don’t trust LLMs. They don’t have the full picture, they go after break fix and sometimes, they’ll waste your time going into circles.

Update: 25 Aug 2026

Tried an update again at this time, tested with the new kernel and that 7.x version that came with the distro still had issues but not as crazy as last time when we had to revert. So we upgraded but kept the v6.8 kernel. Waiting for the 7.x to be stable enough or rather devoid of the regressions.

Pinned kernel:
6.8.12-43-pve


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