If Proxmox won't start a VM with an error like this:


trying to acquire lock...
TASK ERROR: can't lock file '/var/lock/qemu-server/lock-102.conf' - got timeout

rm /var/lock/qemu-server/lock-102.conf

Then try to restart the VM and it should be good.

What we did above was find the lock file that is named lock-VMID (in our case 102) and deleted it to release the lock.

If it's stuck and cannot shutdown this normally works:

qm unlock VMID


qm stop VMID

If the above doesn't work, you can forcefully kill the VM:

1.) Find the process ID

#in the example below we see the Process ID is "1137"

ps aux|grep VMID

2.) Kill the process ID

kill ProcessPIDFromAbove

Example of force killing a VM in Proxmox

proxmox, acquire, task, var, qemu, server, conf, timeoutif, avm, timeout, rm, restart, vm,

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