I am in process of moving ESXi to new hardware (ESXi is installed on USB stick with three hard drives)
But as expected none of hardware listed as data store but disks were available.
I tried this before because of lost USB stick in moving when creating data store from available disks didn't formatted hard drive.
The only difference is this time I used Web UI instead of ESXi client.
I am not VMWare expert especially when you lost 1TB of data
Any help will be much appropriated.
Please let me know if it's recoverable anyhow.
ESXI - 6.5.0 (Build 4564106)
Hi Gary,
Absolutely, you need a recovery tool in order to try to recover the data.
As you will know, there are a lot recovery tools with Linux ISOs, you could try the famous Hieren's Boot.
Hope it helps.
Hi Gary,
So, you have a ESXi installed on a USB stick and when you tried to move the data (partitions) to another HW it doesn't show as listed?
What I understand is that you moved the USB stick as well as the disks to a new chassis, and the 3 HDDs are single disks, i.e. no RAID configuration. Is this assumption correct?
In this case find the "Command line" section at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1011387 to find out whether the datastores are detected as snasphot LUNs.
André
yes, that's correct...
thank you for quick reply. Adding or removing hard drive is not problem but now I don't have any data on this drive.
It seems like ESXi UI formatted the hard drive while attaching/mounting in new hardware.
This is really shitting on VMWare side, really a ridiculous approach not able to find it's own formatted drives.
I don't remember the volume name for the snapshot...
Try the old style.....
esxcfg-volume -l
It lists all volume which are detected as a snapshot. Than you have to write a new signature to.
Regards,
Joerg
Update.
Following this article, VMware Knowledge Base https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2046610
and I am able to get partition,
/vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____ST31000333AS________________________________________5TE03VL1
gpt
121601 255 63 1953525168
Checking offset found at 128:
0110000 d00d c001
0110004
1310000 f15e 2fab
1310004
0131001d 53 65 63 6f 6e 64 44 72 69 76 65 31 54 42 37 32 |SecondDrive1TB72|
0131002d 30 30 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |00..............|
---------------------
but name is showing "SecondDrive1TB72" is one that I provided while trying to mount on new hardware.
Can someone please confirm that I need RECOVERY TOOL here instead of using annoying vmware article to recover partitions?
Hi Gary,
Absolutely, you need a recovery tool in order to try to recover the data.
As you will know, there are a lot recovery tools with Linux ISOs, you could try the famous Hieren's Boot.
Hope it helps.
I used Disk Internals and it's showing all file with appropriate file size (0 for older VMS) which is great.
But there are two Hieren's Boot disk available for google search and I looked into them but they have bunch linux tools.
Please let me know which tools you used specifically for this purpose?
Please remember that I need VMFS recovery tool not vmdk file recovery.
Thank you once again for help...
Sorry for my misunderstanding but I thought you want to recover the files inside the USB.
About the Hiren's boot disk I used Clone disk but to recover vmdk files.
If you want to recover the partition then you can check this article: https://vinfrastructure.it/2013/01/recovering-a-lost-partition-table-with-a-vmfs-datastore/
Yes, it's not easier as other tools but you want to recover a partition, not files...
Hope this helps.