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dkraut
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

ESX 3.5 U3 to ESX 3.5 U5 upgrade failed? Host will not boot!

In place upgrade using a CD. Seemed to be going fine, but then failed with fatal error while trying to install Kudzu. Tried different media and ran the media check, which passed. Decided to rollback and just reboot, but now the Host will not even boot! Complains of error 15 File not found. Please see attachments. Any idea what went wrong and how to resolve? This is a standalone ESX server with only internal storage.

Thanks!

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MauroBonder
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

test esxcfg-boot -r , i hope that works

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dkraut
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Now how would one run that command if the ESX server will not even boot?

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Troy_Clavell
Immortal
Immortal

are there VM's on this host? Would it be feasible to wipe the array and start from scratch, with the U5 media?

jamesbowling
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

If you can just rip and reload this box then that is the route I would take. Do you have any VMs that were currently running on this host? If you do, were they running on local storage or on a SAN?




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dkraut
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

It only uses internal storage and yes, many vm's are on this server. They were all shutdown gracefully before attempting the upgrade.

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jamesbowling
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

How was your disk partitioned out?




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dkraut
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

someone else who's no longer with the company set it up, but I'm pretty sure it was one big partition. Server has (5) 500GB drives probably setup as RAID 5 so there was a single 2TB datastore.

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jamesbowling
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Do you have backups of the VMs on the array? If so, have you tried to reinstall, being careful not to overwrite the datastore? At that point you can reconfigure the ESX host and reattach the datastore to it.




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dkraut
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

No backups, it's a Dev server, but losing the vm's would not be a good thing so I'm reluctant to reinstall. It seems to me that the upgrade failed yet may have overwritten the boot file information? Seems there should be some way to view/edit that info like the boot.ini file in Windows, but I'm not sure how to go about that in Linux?

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khughes
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

I probably should have tested this by now but if you do an install over the existing ESX install, there is a option that asks preserve existing VMFS volumes? Shouldn't that just re-install ESX but keep the datastores in tact?

-- Kyle

"RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "

-- Kyle "RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "
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jamesbowling
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

You could try downloading a Linux LiveCD and booting from it, then mount the boot partition and see about editing /etc/grub.conf which is the file comparable to boot.ini. In case you don't know how to mount the boot partition, you would do the following from a terminal window after booting from the LiveCD:

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

That should mount the root partition unless the person before you did custom partitions. If not, you would have the default partitions. One other partition that might be worth mounting is the /var/log partition which by default is /dev/sda2. If you mount that partition, you may be able to get some log output and see something that you normally would not. And for the sake of completing this, /dev/sda1 would be /boot which is where your kernels are stored.

My recommendation would be to boot from a livecd, mount all of the partitions I have told you about and taking a look around. We might be able to see better by looking at all three to find out what is wrong. Hope this helps!

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jamesbowling
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

I believe with ESX it will not try to remove the datastores that are there. It will prompt you...like I stated in my post earlier, you just have to be careful not to accidentally overwrite the VMFS partition. It just takes slow movement and a keen eye to make sure you are safe. :smileymischief:

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dkraut
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

OK Thanks, before I try the reinstall, one other thought came up... Is it still possible to obtain ESX 3.5 Update 4? I'm thinking that possibly it will perform the upgrade without error. I've searched but cannot find any version other than Update 5.

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khughes
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

You would have to click on the past history/versions... It's somewhere on the page but I think that is a mute point. It probably wont upgrade if the host is in the degraded state like it is.

-- Kyle

"RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "

-- Kyle "RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "
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jamesbowling
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Even if it was able to be upgraded, I would not trust that it was 100%. I think your best bet is to just reinstall.

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dkraut
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

ok guys, based on some info I found on the HCL regarding the IBM x3650, I decided to install ESX 4 Update 2 and it found and allowed me to preserve the datatstore. I have it back in vcenter and it appears to be fine now. The only issue is that the vm's are all showing as orphaned, but I was able to remove them and then add to Inventory to resolve. Thanks for the guidance!! Cheers!

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jamesbowling
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Well I am glad that you got it all worked out! Have a good weekend!

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