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vmware12
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

vCenter Appliance cannot boot due to bad superblock

Hi everyone,

Came in this morning and our testlab was down, it's on 6.5. It would respond to ping, but the web client was down. I logged into vcenter directly through the address on the esxi splash page. I found the appliance on this page:

1.JPG

Googling the error I came across this KB : "fsck failed" error when starting vCenter Server Appliance (2081464) | VMware KB

When I run the commands they suggest I get the following:

2.JPG

So I called my Linux guy over and he had me run some commands, giving me the following output:

3.JPG

He's saying it looks like we should have 4 sda drives from the look of ls /dev/ but that only 3 are showing up when he specifically lists them. Talking to the Storage team, I found out that the Equalogic that the Appliance is on threw some errors last night and had it's issues, but that it recovered fine.

So what I'm hearing from Linux and Storage is that this is basically a perfect storm of errors and I'll need to rebuild (No backups in the Testlab, obviously) from scratch. I was hoping you fine people would have some brilliant ideas/insights to save me.

Let me know!

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5 Replies
mikelacroix
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

The symptoms that are displayed are outlined in KB2149838.

Once you run through the KB, pay attention to the startup messages and if there are any other issues, such as "cannot manually run 'fsck /dev/log_vg/log'," make note.

:# e2fsck -y /dev/log_vg/log

:# reboot

This should resolve your issue.

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Vijay2027
Expert
Expert

Run # journalctl which will give you corrupt volume.

Then issue the command # fsck -fyv <volume>

usually, the volume would be /dev/sda3 or /dev/log_vg/log

FYI, /dev/sda2 is swap volume.

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Vijay2027
Expert
Expert

were you able to fix this??

Thank you.

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mikelacroix
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

This most likely isn't an issue anymore. It was posted ~1 year ago but I figured I'd give an answer regardless of whether it's still relevant.

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AbdulBasitKhan
Contributor
Contributor

I faced the same issue today, and googling this page helped me alot, 

i first try to run e2fsck /dev/sda1  this gives me no error

then i try to run e2fsck /dev/sda2 this shows me bad super block but i was unable to fix it

then i run e2fsck -y /dev/sda2 nothing happen

by running journalctl command and scrolling till last i found that /dev/sda3 is corrupted, 

e2fsck -y /dev/sda3 

this command fixed my issue

 

Thanks

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