topic Re: vCenter Appliance cannot boot due to bad superblock in VMware vCenter™ Discussions

vCenter Appliance cannot boot due to bad superblock

vmware12 — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 15:53:05 GMT

Hi everyone,

Came in this morning and our testlab was down, it's on 6.5. It would respond to ping, but the web client was down. I logged into vcenter directly through the address on the esxi splash page. I found the appliance on this page:

Googling the error I came across this KB : "fsck failed" error when starting vCenter Server Appliance (2081464) | VMware KB

When I run the commands they suggest I get the following:

So I called my Linux guy over and he had me run some commands, giving me the following output:

He's saying it looks like we should have 4 sda drives from the look of ls /dev/ but that only 3 are showing up when he specifically lists them. Talking to the Storage team, I found out that the Equalogic that the Appliance is on threw some errors last night and had it's issues, but that it recovered fine.

So what I'm hearing from Linux and Storage is that this is basically a perfect storm of errors and I'll need to rebuild (No backups in the Testlab, obviously) from scratch. I was hoping you fine people would have some brilliant ideas/insights to save me.

Let me know!

Re: vCenter Appliance cannot boot due to bad superblock

mikelacroix — Sat, 04 Aug 2018 03:14:07 GMT

The symptoms that are displayed are outlined in KB2149838.

Once you run through the KB, pay attention to the startup messages and if there are any other issues, such as "cannot manually run 'fsck /dev/log_vg/log'," make note.

:# e2fsck -y /dev/log_vg/log

:# reboot

This should resolve your issue.

Re: vCenter Appliance cannot boot due to bad superblock

Vijay2027 — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 00:53:18 GMT

Run # journalctl which will give you corrupt volume.

Then issue the command # fsck -fyv <volume>

usually, the volume would be /dev/sda3 or /dev/log_vg/log

FYI, /dev/sda2 is swap volume.

Re: vCenter Appliance cannot boot due to bad superblock

Vijay2027 — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 08:42:50 GMT

were you able to fix this??

Thank you.

Re: vCenter Appliance cannot boot due to bad superblock

mikelacroix — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 09:48:15 GMT

This most likely isn't an issue anymore. It was posted ~1 year ago but I figured I'd give an answer regardless of whether it's still relevant.

Re: vCenter Appliance cannot boot due to bad superblock

AbdulBasitKhan — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 09:57:19 GMT

I faced the same issue today, and googling this page helped me alot,

i first try to run e2fsck /dev/sda1 this gives me no error

then i try to run e2fsck /dev/sda2 this shows me bad super block but i was unable to fix it

then i run e2fsck -y /dev/sda2 nothing happen

by running journalctl command and scrolling till last i found that /dev/sda3 is corrupted,

e2fsck -y /dev/sda3

this command fixed my issue

Thanks