Empty datastore after reboot

[santiago78]

Hi everyone

After a power failure I had to reboot my ESXi 5.10 server, and after that the virtual maching hosted by the ESXi server appeared in Unknown state, when I opened the datastore browser I realized that the datastore is empty, so no vmk file or the virtual machine flat files in it... all gone!!!

After searching a lot I couldn't find a solution yet, the files are there althought the datastore is empty because I tried DiskInternals VFMS Recovery and it brings a lot of files inside the virtual machine but without their real name.

When I access the ESXi through SSH all the ESXi file structre is there and it works well, but when I go to the datastore it's empty as well as its shown in vSphere Client

I suspect that something in the ESXi partition table or in the MTF it's wrong, but I cannot figure out how to make the disappeared files appear again in the datastore to run again the virtual machine.

Any help will be appreciated

Regards

[john_lauro]

I assume you are you connecting to a vcenter server?  What if you connect directly to the ESXi server with the client instead of to vcenter?  If that works, you probably just need vcenter to reconnect to the ESXi server.

[continuum]

Diskinternals VMFS-recovery is a good tool - but unfortunately not very helpful when selecting an appropriate search procedure.
If you only get unnamed Windows-files you selected a search that assumes you search inside a damaged NTFS-volume.
With ESXi 5.1 you have a quite reasonable chance that a good part of the missing files can be recovered.
Next steps:
stop all activity on that datastore and create a VMFS-header-dump
https://www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi68oS1o8zNA...‌

Ulli