Help! Formatting a former Hyper-V CSV Volume with VMFS won't work

[drexciya]

For test purposes I used a LUN in my environment for Hyper-V R2.

It worked (that's about it).

Now I want to do something useful again, so I re-installed the server with ESX 4 or ESX 3.5, but...

The SAN LUNs I used as CSV volumes with Hyper-V are visible (they're recognized as HPFS/NTFS), but

I can't overwrite them or remove them. I get a message "Failed to update partition information" when trying to create a VMFS partition.

Using (s)fdisk from a PuTTy session doesn't work as well. It has the same problem.

I think it has something to do with writing data somewhere where the usual utilities/tools cannot write any data.

I've seen this before and finally we couldn't do better than destroying the LUN on the SAN and then re-creating it.

Does anyone have a better/working solution?

[ThompsG]

Morning,

Probably too late now but what storage array are you running?

There is the old quick and dirty option to use fdisk from the console to blow the disk partition information away.

Kind regards,

Glen

[drexciya]

This is on a NetApp FibreChannel SAN, but I've had the same problem on a IBM DS4300 FC-SAN with Hyper-V R1.

I've tried (s)fdisk and that works after first performing a brutal dd command on the partition table.

But formatting the volume fails; it's the vmkfstools step that fails. The vmkernel log shows lots of nasty messages

which talk about locking, but it's an unused and thoroughly wiped volume.