Operating System not found

[Mike-S]

Hi,

I am running ESX 3.5 connected to an HP EVA 5000 SAN. I also use vRanger with VCB to do a once a week backup. Today one of the backups of a virtual machine failed and it left a snapshot in place called "consolidated helper". I deleted this snap and restarted the virtual machine.

When I restarted the OS wouldn't boot and I now get a PXE boot with an error saying "operating system not found".

I can browse the the LUN on the SAN and see the VMDK files so they files are there. The virtual machine is still pointing to the files as well.

Does anybody know how I can fix this and get my virtual machine backup without having to restore an old copy?

Thanks

[Erik_Zandboer]

Hi,

You could try to mount the vmdk file (C: so to speak) to another VM as secondary vmdk (SCSI0:1). Then boot (or rescan disks if hot-added) the other VM. Now you should see your "failing" boot drive as secondary disk on the other VM. You could investigate if the filesystem on that disk seems fine. That should hopefully give you some answer.

Furthermore, you can try to create a new VM, mimicking the failing VM, but you do not create a new disk, but use the "failing" disk instead. Try to boot that new VM. That should rule out any weird errors in the VM's config.