ESXi 4.0 server died / how to recover user data

[prinetti]

Hi,

I had a problem with a server running ESXI 4.0.

The server runs ESXi 4.0 and on the ESXi environment runs 3 virtualmachine.

One of the virtual machine is OpenFiler, a file server application.

The server use two disk in Raid (one seems corrupted)

Now the server died completely and I have to recover the files stored in the OpenFiler directory.

I removed the HD from the machine and connected to another machine. Unfortunately the ESXI environment do not start correctly due to NIC card incompatibility.

So I have a 250G HD with the following partitions>

• Hypervisor0 4MB FAT
• Hypervisor1 250MB FAT
• Hypervisor2 250MB FAT
• Unnamed 11MB unknown type 
  
• Hypervisor3 299 MB FAT
• Unamed partiton 227 MB
• unknown type 4 GB FAT
• unknow type 227GB unknown type

I suppose that the data are on the 227GB unknown partition since they should be aroun 75GB of data but I have no idea on how to access it.

An attempt could be to mount  the ESXi as a virtual machine on VmWare Workstation but the file is a disk and not a virtual machine so I do not know how to mount it.

Could you please suggest a solution?

Thank you

Giovanni

[JMachieJr]

You can try taking a look at this article on how to mount a VMFS datastore from Windows or Linux. I don't know all the facts about your situation but I hope this helps you out. Once you get access to the VMFS datastore you will be able to access the VMDK's and load up any VM in VMware Workstation.

http://woshub.com/how-to-access-vmfs-datastore-from-linux-windows/