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sagroskin
Contributor
Contributor

Starting VM Problems

When starting a VM the below error message comes up. Running ESX 4.0, the server restarted and this is happening to several of the VMs. I searched here but did not come across anything. Thank you for your help.

"Power On virtual machine Server1 Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/-4b8aedff-da92d-689-ad03-00304-89d569b/Server1/Server1.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: I/O error accessing change tracking file."
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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome to the community.

Seems that a required file is missing.

You can try to manually delete this line from .vmdk file (the smallest file):

changeTrackPath="XXXX-ctk.vmdk"

Make a copy before make any change!

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
sagroskin
Contributor
Contributor

Tried removing that line and still having the same issue. It looks like all these VMs were created from a template and they all use that template as a base disk. The file is definitely still there, just something wrong with it. Is there any way to have the VMs stop using the template disk and have all the data in their own vmdk?

Thanks again for your help.

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Is not so simple to have a base template for a VM. Are you using View?

Have you tried to use Converter to make a copy of the VM?

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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sagroskin
Contributor
Contributor

Andre, thank you for your help. I resolved the issue by restarting the SAN and all the ESX hosts. I did try using the converter and after 5 minutes it also give an error message. The same VM's that had the issue powering on would randomly freeze one at a time (the reason ESX host was rebooted... at which point they would not power on), and would work again once the VM was rebooted. I'm still not sure what the root cuase of the issue is, I'm using the same SAN and ESX setup at another location without a problem.

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