Increase in Disk Size Blew Up Cluster

[Xitor]

One of our ESX admins got a request to increase a disk from 15 to 25GB. The disk was shared between two VMs as part of an MS Cluster. He shut down both nodes, selected Edit settings, increased the size, and when he tried to start up the server afterwards he got the error:

VMware ESX Server Cannot open the virtual disk, (diskname) for clustering. Please verify the disk was created with the 'thick option'.

Apparently the attempt to increase the disk size in the VI client has changed the disk type. Is there any way to recover from this?

I tried to to copy the VMDK from the disk to another test VM and open it. All I see is the 25G disk, no partitions. At this point all I care about is getting the data back from the original 15GB disk, I can always create a new 25GB shared disk and put the data there, assuming I can get it back.

Thanks,

X

[SuryaVMware]

Try to recover the partition using 3rd pary windows recovery software. Even if you use a trail version of the software and could figure out the start and end sectors of the previous partitions. you should be able to re-build the partition and the set the partition type to the right one should do the trick.

Partition type '7' is for the standard NTFS and 'SFS' is for the Windows Dynamic disk.

Hope this helps.

-Surya

[notorious_bdg]

Use vmkfstools to clone the vmdk file, then configure the VM to use the new vmdk.

[jaygt]

I had this same issue a few days ago. It appears when you utilize the vmkfstool -X command it changes a thick disk to a thin one. After a few trial and errors I was able to resolve the problem with the following steps.

First, Copied the file spool.vmdk, with the vmkfstools -i, to /vmfs/volumes/restore as a backup.

Second, Copied the spool.vmdk again to /vmfs/volumes/test, expanded it to 3 Gig, with the vmkfstool -X command.

Third, I then deleted the original spool.vmdk from /vmfs/volumes/mscprint, and then copied the newly expanded spool.vmdk file from /vmfs/volume/test to /vmfs/volume/mscprint, with the vmkfstools -i command. The imported the *.vmdk as a thick disk.

I booted the OS and excuted the dispart command to have the OS recognized the new drive space.