VMware Cloud Community
jasee
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi 6, corrupted partition?

When I try to acess the ESXi machine remotely using  Vsphere remotely, I can't see any of the virtual machines, I created and the vmfs volume is greyed out and I can't create any virtual machines. I think maybe there are some bad blocks on the disk or the file system is corrupted. I've looked at the disk in gparted, but the even though some of the partitions are Fat16, none of them contain a recognisable filing system. Is there some sort of chkdsk command  or some way of getting the server to check its disk?

Reply
0 Kudos
6 Replies
continuum
Immortal
Immortal

gparted will only show you a large partition with the number 3.
Do not expect that a Linux-LiveCD can read that partition or show you the correct partitiontype.

If you are interested in a analysis of the VMFS-volume create a dump of the first 1536MB of partition 3 like this:

dd if=/dev/sdX3 of=/tmp/j_c_.1536 bs=1M count=1536
Replace X with the actual letter that is used.
Compress the j_c_.1536 and give me a download-link.

If that is no option next troubleshooting steps are to check the partitiontable from ESXi with the partedUtil getptbl .... command.


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

Reply
0 Kudos
jasee
Contributor
Contributor

This seems good, thank, possibly, but it's not clear where I run this from. On the vsphere application, you can open a 'console' window, but there's no cursor, so you can't put in the commands, on the Esxi server, if you logon, there's no terminal window

Reply
0 Kudos
jasee
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, gparted actually shows about six partitions, on the disk, so I don't know what happened there! Smiley Sad

Thanks for your offer of help.:-)

Vsphere seems to be the only way of administering Esxi, yet it seems remarkably unversatile, AFAICT you can't even open a terminal window, and the Esxi server has a very limited set of commands when logged into, unless I'm missing something

Reply
0 Kudos
jasee
Contributor
Contributor

(In reply to myself) In case anyone else is in the same situation. I tried an upgrade Eski 6 to Eski6 using the original CD. There are options to retain the vms etc. Although this had no effect, fortunately, it still retained all the previous settings.

I also tried shift + R, from the boot menu which is (I found out) supposed to give a recovery mode, but it seems as though you have to have already made a backup, somewhere. Within vsphere maybe? Where's that option?

I also tried a new installation on a blank disk, IIRC a normal Linux install usually installs a minimum of three partitions, again Eski using the default options installed six or more

Reply
0 Kudos
alansparrow
Contributor
Contributor

We saw something similar this week and worked with support to gain a favorable solution.  What we ended up doing is deleting all of the partitions and recreating the partition using partedUtil setptbl.  I wouldn't attempt this without support on the line.  They repaired two LUN's for us using this method.

My question for you is how did this happen?  For us, it looks like the partition tables corrupted during our upgrade of the ESXi host from version 5.1 U2 to 6.0 U1b using Update Manager.  Were you updating ESXi when the partition table corrupted?

Reply
0 Kudos