We had a host failure over the weekend which involved recovering from our copied systems. It has worked fine on vmware vms ( 6.7) with single disk but we have a system that had two disks which can not find the boot disk.
Our method of backup is to
The reason for snapshotting is to get round the device busy problem of copying an active disk file.
The copied files look like this
perfweb-000001.vmdk | perfweb.nvram | perfweb.vmsd | perfweb_5-000001.vmdk perfweb_5.vmdk | |
perfweb-flat.vmdk | perfweb.vmdk | perfweb.vmx | perfweb_5-flat.vmdk | vmware.log |
grep vmdk *vmx
scsi0:0.fileName = "perfweb_5.vmdk"
scsi0:1.fileName = "perfweb.vmdk"
more perfweb.vmdk
# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
encoding="UTF-8"
CID=dfa4ef68
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="vmfs"
# Extent description
RW 536870912 VMFS "perfweb-flat.vmdk"
# The Disk Data Base
#DDB
ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.deletable = "true"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "33418"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.longContentID = "1bebe3a906b8671aad09f8aedfa4ef68"
ddb.thinProvisioned = "1"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 99 98 c6 0d ed-ae de 52 30 eb fd 14 5d"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "14"
The only error I can see on power on in vmware.log is
DISK: failed to create nomad vob context.
and more signicantly
No operating system was found.
Any pointers what to try next would be greatly appreciated
Moderator: Thread moved to the Backup & Recovery area.
You do not copy the nvram - that means that the recovered VM uses default boot-order : floppy/iso first, next scsi0:0, finally network
So in your case you very likely need to go into the BIOS / EFI and adjust bootorder so that first boot-device will be scsi0:1
Thanks very much for your reply. The nvram was not copied but it showed up in the ls command as the system was running at the time
All that was copied was the vmx and vmdk files.
The boot disk is actually on scsi0:1
Things I've tried:
making it single disk and pointing perfweb.vmdk as scsi0:0
selecting the boot drive via EFI
checking boot settings via Boot Maintenance Manager
Thanks
Paul
It seems if I "boot from file" via EFI I can boot the system.
The problem suggests corrupted vmx file and to create a new vm but point to the existing vmdk device as explained here
I'm not sure if this option exists in vsphere as it only seems to allow new device creation
Is there a way to create ( not register ) a new vm and point to an existing disk using esxi and vsphere 6.7?
As the solution to the problem now seems to have moved away from the original question, marking this as answered and will create a separate post on that specific question
Unfortunately, I was wrong in thinking I had a fix for this issue.
If anyone has any pointers what the issue could be eg. re-install the boot loader or change a vmx or vmdk setting that would be great