You said you can't boot into debug mode, so that puts standard troubleshooting practices to a zero.
However when i look at your screenshots then it appears something is wrong with the GRUB setup.
If you have a linux live CD, it would be interesting to see why the system doesn't recognize the UUID as root.
The other day i had this myself when i cloned the original IDE disk that holds ESX to a CD disk in my lab. As a result the grub setup on the MBR was flawed.
In my case i managed to get it resolved as follows:
After a ghost clone to another disk, my ESX host in the lab came up with the much appreciated "GRUB" message at the boot loader prompt. Without an option to do anything. Turns out the GRUB MBR record is damaged, you cannot rerun the upgrade ISO CD image for this as it will not refresh that bit unless you re-install instead of upgrade.
So i found myself a Red Hat 9 install CD and performed the following:
Boot into rescue mode
linux rescue
Click defaults until the final screen where it tells you that it will not mount the drive as it didn't find any linux, but you are given the prompt that you need, click "Continue" and here you go a linux prompt.
Now suppose your boot disk is /dev/hda and the boot partition is /dev/hda1 and the root partition is /dev/hda2 (You can check this with fdisk -l for yourself.
mkdir /mnt/sysimage
mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/sysimage
chroot /mnt/sysimage
Ok, so now we are back in our system, but we still don't have access to our boot partition and the grub installer will need that.
mount /dev/hda1 /boot
Check that our boot folder isn't empty anymore
ls -lh
Now if everything went well you can put back the MBR record by issuing the following command.
grub-install /dev/hda
If it doesn't complain then you can now reboot the host and boot again from your normale storage.
PS: It stores info in /boot/device.map, check with cat if it is correct if you have issues.
PPS: I also tried this with a knoppix and a Linux System Rescue CD, the latter one didn't work as it was looking for the zsh shell.
Additionally check that the UUID in grub.conf is indeed the correct one.
The command to show you the UUIDs of the attached disks is: blkid
--
Wil
Ah i'm sorry, i actually knew that blkid isn't in ESX 3.0.x and it appears that it didn't make it into 3.5 either.
Without that command i'm not sure how you would find this out easily (I do know a workaround as i've had to code an alternative way in the vm-relocate.sh script that you can find on the forum). It has been part of the e2fsprogs package since version 1.26 according to the man page. The e2fsprogs install on ESX 3.5 is version 1.32..... so i'm not sure why it isn't included.
For security reasons? Can't think of any...
But as i mentioned in the post, you can take a simple linux liveCD and use the blkid command from there.
--
Wil
