dude, where is my OS?

[amishera]

Each time I am booting, I get a grub screen (with a grub prompt, as shown in the screenshot) unlike regular grub screen. I didn't do anything unusual ... only last time it booted, I found the virtual machine in vSphere got some error message while botting up. Hence I rebooted the ESX host in hope getting some cure but ironically I am stuck in this grub trap. Anyone for the rescue?? Thanks

[timjwatts]

Something has moved or gone wrong disk wise I would say. VMWare is a red herring partly here - the same problem could be (and I have had) with physical hosts. Specifically, it sounds like Grub cannot find the /boot/grub/* files or one or two files in that directory have gone missing.

You could:

1) Can you netboot or virtual CD boot the VM in question with a rescue-linux type system and check that the virtual disk still has a /boot and /boot/grub/* and tha the contents

2) Or you could try some stuff from the Grub> prompt eg:

find /boot/grub/menu.lst

or

find /grub/menu.lst

failing that try

find /boot/grub/stage1

and

find /grub/stage1

If you get some joy you could try a variation on (from memory)

root (hd0)

setup (hd0,x)

where x is the partition number from "find" above.

Cheers

Tim

[DSTAVERT]

Do you have local datastores or SAN? If you have local datastores then you might consider installing ESXi to a USB flash disk 1GB or larger. ESXi will recognize the local datastores and you will be able to browse and offload your VMs. Reinstall ESX. If VMs are on SAN I would just reinstall. ESXi on flash will will work just fine in production.

[amishera]

Guys, thanks for your responses.

I tried the recipe mentioned in the following website:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=211383

The system was able to boot but I got the notorious "you have entered the recovery shell" screen (which I can never able to resolve). So unfortunately enough I have to reinstall the OS which seems to be the only option left.

Did you guys notice that ESXi 5.0 is more stable than ESX 4.1 U2? It never gives that "recovery shell" crap despite hardware (storage controller) mismatch. I hope ESX 4.1 U2 would be a good riddance when it becomes obsolete by ESXi 5.0.

[AndreTheGiant]

IMHO vSphere 4.x was enough stable (as also VI 3.x).

You can have some issue if you use local storage and change the storage adapters. With shared storage I've never had any issues.

For this reason I suggest to use (as suggested in previous post) the USB/Flash solution for ESXi... is really simple, you can change it, you can also make a clone of your flash... and you can isolate the hypervisor installation from the datastore area.

Andre

[amishera]

Good idea. I will try that. Thanks