ESXi

I have a Dell R900 and all the storage is on local. One container is 2x300Gb mirrored and the other is 6x300Gb RAID-5. I formatted both with 1Mb blocks when the server was originally set up, but now I need to redo the bigger partition with 4Mb blocks. All the sessions have been moved so there is no data loss if i f reformat the drive.

I tried the folowing command:

vmkfstools -C vmfs3 -b 4M /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60024e8070008600120483a60aaf60cc

and got this back:

Creating vmfs3 file system on "naa.60024e8070008600120483a60aaf60cc" with blockSize 4194304 and volume label "none".

/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60024e8070008600120483a60aaf60cc: Permission denied. (Have you set the partition type to 0xfb?)

Error: Permission denied

Now how do I use the fdisk tool to set the partition type to "0xfb", so I can run vmkfstools with above command?

I'm doing this all via SSH session.

-ttpura

Hello and welcome to the forums.

Check out kb article 4232167 for the fdisk instructions.

Good Luck!

Follow these steps:

1) fdisk /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60024e8070008600120483a60aaf60cc

2) type "n" for new partition

3) select "p" for primary partition

4) type "1" to enter the partition no.

5) type "enter" twice to set the default cylinder blocks (assuming you want the whole disk size for the partition)

6) type "t" to change partition type.

7) type "1" for the the partition no.

8) type "fb" to set the partition type to VMFS

9) type "w" to save the new partition table & quit.

Use "vmkfstools -C vmfs3 -b 4M /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60024e8070008600120483a60aaf60cc:1" to create the vmfs filesystem.

PS: Please award points if any of the above information is useful.

Thanks guys; all done.B-)