video passthru crashed linux guest, guest now won't complete boot

[uyozTic]

vSphere Client: ver: 6.0.0   build: 5112508

VMware ESXi:    ver: 6.0.0   build: 3380124

guest: fedora 28

i attempted to passthru a nvidia 770 card to a fedora guest. passthru went ok, the guest could see it. installed the nvidia driver and disabled the noveau video driver.  when i rebooted back into graphical.target mode, guest crashed along with ESXi. that is, ESXi had to be rebooted.

now, the fedora guest won't complete boot, just hangs. even in rescue mode. two other guests, a debian and win2008r2 were running at time of crash but they boot up just fine. seems when i installed the nvidia driver and rebooted, neither the guest nor esxi liked that.

vSphere client lists the guest status power on as completed.

i can ping the guest, but i think many services didn't start because boot process never completes and i can't ssh into it.

i can however get to the grub shell, so maybe i can get this guest to mount somehow and save my data?

any ideas as how to mount this and get my data, or how to force it to now boot into multi-user.target and see if it completes boot?

[bluefirestorm · Accepted solution]

Have you tried shutting down the Fedora 28 VM and then adding its virtual disk(s) to another Linux VM as their secondary disk(s) to get to the data?

[uyozTic]

no, didn't know one could do that.

not even sure how to do that.  do i add it via "virtual machine properties" of the another linux VM ?

[uyozTic]

@bluefirestorm ,

that worked. backing up that disk's data now!! as you can imagine, many thanks!!!