ESXi 6.7U3 stuck on Starting service vmtoolsd

[mithrandir1030]

It will be much appreciated if you could give me some advice.

I was playing around with vSAN encryption and dragged a host out of encryption enabled vSAN cluster.

Then I executed "vm-support" on this host and tried "vm-support -x" to unzip log bundle.

Something happened during unzip, the process was stuck. No matter what I did, how long I waited, the unzip process didn't stop or finish.

So I had to restart ESXi and the power on was stuck on "Starting service vmtoolsd"

Alt-F12 gives below:

Alt-F1 gives below:

Even I tried to re-install ESXi, error occured after I entered F11

SO what is the cause? Is something wrong with the disk? What should I do to solve this ?

[bsob]

Hi

You have probably problem with you boot disk device such as SD card or USB stick. You can check this link to perform some repair action. If you cannot repair boot device you should rebuild your esxi. VMware Knowledge Base

[mithrandir1030]

Thanks for your KB sharing.

But could you tell me how to execute command shown in KB ?

For example:

To repair the altbootbank partition:

1. Run this command to determine the device for /altbootbank:
   
   vmkfstools -P /altbootbank

Because my ESXi boot is stuck, I couldn't access SSH console.

By the way, I know pressing ALT-F1 seems to be a way to SSH console, but I cannot execute any command there.

[bsob]

If you don't have access to the console, there is no other supported solution to repair your boot device, however ESXi created vfat file system and you can try repair mounting this files system on a different operating system like Fedora, and use dosfsck. If you don't want to waste time repairing your boot device, the better solution should be reinstall your esxi and restore manually the configuration.