Cloning ESXi USB stick corrupted it!

[uyozTic]

ESXi ver: 6.7.0_8169922  free ver

today i used USB Image Tool 1.80 to clone my home lab ESXi USB stick. it backed up the clone to my hard disk. before restoring that image to another USB stick i put the original

stick back into the server to make sure it would boot. it wouldn't!!

the error on screen is:

VMware Hypervisor Recovery

  Bank 5: invalid configuration

  Bank 6: not a vmware boot bank

  No hyper visor found

i then restored the backed up clone image to another USB stick hoping it would work, same error.

1). anyway to fix this is my first question

2). why would cloning the good stick to hard drive have messed up the ESXi on that stick that had been working all this time?

[uyozTic]

USB with Hypervisor ESXi 5.1 image - www.alexpage.de

https://www.virten.net/2014/12/clone-esxi-installations-on-sd-cards-or-usb-flash-drives/

i see this issues isn't so uncommon. a couple posters mentioned they had used gparted to renumber the partitions in order for the usb esxi to boot.

these are the partition numbers i need to rename. they should be (Parition ID 1 and 5-9) not 1...6. advice on how to do that in parted?

sudo sgdisk --print /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 62333952 sectors, 29.7 GiB

Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes

Disk identifier (GUID): 41510505-AFF5-45DB-BDCB-6487E5227584

Partition table holds up to 128 entries

Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33

First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 62333918

Partitions will be aligned on 32-sector boundaries

Total free space is 55247997 sectors (26.3 GiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name

   1              64            8191   4.0 MiB     EF00 

   2            8224          520191   250.0 MiB   0700 

   3          520224         1032191   250.0 MiB   0700 

   4         1032224         1257471   110.0 MiB   FC00 

   5         1257504         1843199   286.0 MiB   0700 

   6         1843200         7086079   2.5 GiB     FC00 

-------------------------------------------------------------------  

[Lalegre · Accepted solution]

Hey uyozTic​,

To be honest maybe you find the way on cloning and make everything work but I recommend you to do a fresh install and configure everything once again. You will waste less time and less headaches than doing some cloning that is not supported.

Also that article you are following is from 2014 and the ESXi suffered different changes on the partitions during the time of that post so I am not 100% sure if that is going to work.

[loungehostmaste]

why don't you just use "dd" on whatever Linux livesystem or an existing install?

dd if=/dev/sdx bs=1M of=image.img bs=1M
dd if=image.img bs=1M of=/dev/sdx bs=1M

[uyozTic]

Re: Cloning ESXi USB stick corrupted it!

@Lalegre​

i think you're right, that is, just reinstall a new usb stick and reconfigure. i've used up quite a bit of time just trying to figure out a way to "fix" that stick.

the saved vm's should be ok to import back, i hope. the nics port groups are a concern but i have most of that written down.

that particular post is old granted, and 'dd' would have been the way to go, though hindsight is a luxury.

i did manage to find some ESXi_67_Logs_RsrvUSBStick backup files with some useful info like data store/drive names, nic names and such. that's something.

off to start reinstall later tonight. thanks for your comments.

[uyozTic]

>why don't you just use "dd" on whatever Linux livesystem or an existing install?

>dd if=/dev/sdx bs=1M of=image.img bs=1M

>dd if=image.img bs=1M of=/dev/sdx bs=1M

i tried that. the issue is when i put the original/working esxi 6.7 stick into a win7 notebook to clone with that usb image tool, that tool or win7 somehow renumbered the partitions on that stick. esxi partitions 5 & 6 (esxi banks) got re-numbered 1 & 2, thus esxi wouldn't boot. you can see others write of the issue here:

                    USB with Hypervisor ESXi 5.1 image - www.alexpage.de

  some users on that thread mentioned they managed to rewrite the re-numbered partitions and viola, it booted again. i never quite figured out how to to that with `sgdisk`, moving, copying, deleting partitions, etc or however they did it.

thus, when i used `dd` to clone the cloned stick had the same partition /mbr/gpt scheme.

i could be wrong but i think that is what happened. note that, "usb image tool" has an option to "fix GPT after restore (prevents partition re-enumeration)" but darn, didn't seem to fix mine.

your point is well taken and tried and i appreciate your help.