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Fcolau
Contributor
Contributor

ESX 3.5, electric failure, boot impossible

Hi,

First i would like to apologize for my english because it's not my mothertongue.

Now my problem, we got today an electrical failure, all our servers went down, one of our ESX is impossible to book, he wants to enter in maintenance mode to repair a filesystem.

But, when we try this, with fsck all filesystems are good, thus I suppose it's the vmfs wich is corrupted ?

(you can see the error message on the attached file)

Anyone can help me ? Smiley Happy

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Chamon
Commander
Commander

Have you tried to run a repair install on the host?

After un presenting the LUNs from the host with the issue? This is to ensure that you don't mistakenly wipe out your VMFS partitions!

Message was edited by: Chamon

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VMmatty
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

You can also try reinstalling ESX 3.5 over the existing installation. There will be an option to keep all existing VMFS partitions during the install so you won't overwrite anything. Assuming your disk subsystem is still in good shape after the power failure, this may be a fast way to get back up and running.

Who makes the server? Can you check to see if there are any hardware failures by using Dell OpenManage or the equivalent for your hardware vendor?

Matt | http://www.thelowercasew.com | @mattliebowitz
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Fcolau
Contributor
Contributor

The server is a Dell 2950.

We tried this morning to reinstall ESX 3.5 with the option "Keep Virtual Machines & VMFS", the ESX is now booting but it don't have a datastore.

But, we followed another procedure we found on internet : with LVM Resignature, rescan the Storage Adapter, and create new UUID for the VMs and it works Smiley Happy

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