error: broken pipe on virtual disk in esxi4

[aaron465]

Hi,

I have recently bought a brand new HP ProLiant ML110 (G5) for my VMware environment at home - which is going great so far

I have successfully migrated 2 windows server 2008 virtual machines from my old Vmware Server 2 (running on ubuntu server 64-bit) by just copying the virtual hard disks across and creating new virtual machines with those disks on the new box. I have a third 2008 VM which is having some issues though. When you try to boot up the virtual machine the vSphere client displays the following message:

"Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/blah.../File Server/os/FileServer.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: Broken pipe."

This disk was working perfectly fine just this morning on the old box, so I am unsure as to why it has failed. Below is the contents of the .vmdk file - I cannot see anything obviously wrong with it at the moment, but I have not been on the virtualisation bandwagon for very long, and am far from an expert in it

1. Disk DescriptorFile

version=1

encoding="UTF-8"

CID=540e3393

parentCID=ffffffff

createType="twoGbMaxExtentSparse"

1. Extent description

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s001.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s002.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s003.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s004.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s005.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s006.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s007.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s008.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s009.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s010.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s011.vmdk"

RW 4192256 SPARSE "File Server-s012.vmdk"

RW 24576 SPARSE "File Server-s013.vmdk"

1. The Disk Data Base

#DDB

ddb.virtualHWVersion = "7"

ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 90 58 26 ac 7e-55 a7 bf ee d1 05 08 ff"

ddb.geometry.cylinders = "3133"

ddb.geometry.heads = "255"

ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"

ddb.toolsVersion = "7397"

I have attached the file aswell because this forum converts the number signs to actual numbers!

Any advice on this situation would be great,

Thanks - Aaron Trout

[DSTAVERT]

Did your server install have any uncommitted snapshots? Post your vmx from the old server.

[aaron465]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply. The VM on the old server did not have any snapshots, if I am using snapshots I always remove them after I am done. Also unfortunately I do not have the original vmx file, but if you just wanted to confirm there were no snapshots, I have never made a snapshot from this machine as it is only a file server (with DFS) and also has IIS & MySQL/PHP. There are two other virtual disks (which seem to be working) on this VM aswell if that means anything.

Thanks,

Aaron

[DSTAVERT]

If you can, watch the log files on the ESXi host while you start the VM. See if there is anything helpful. Get to the real time logs ALT+F12

You could try running converter against the VM. Run against the running machine on server with the destination as ESXi host.

[aaron465]

Hi,

The logs were not really that useful, but I had an idea - which was to use WinImage to convert the virtual disk files from a vmware disk to a vmware disk. This actually worked, even though it sounds like it would do nothing. I think the reason that the disks were broken was from me trying to shrink them using vmware tools from inside the virtual machine. The firs time i tried this the vmware tools process crashed, so probably left something on the disk corrupt. This still doesn't explain why they still worked on the old vmware server 2 box, but oh well - its working now!

Thanks for all your help

Aaron

[DSTAVERT]

Glad it's working.

Have fun.

[DSTAVERT]

Converter would probably have worked as well. If you haven't, download it. Great tool for copying, semi hot moving etc.