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GaryGhotra
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Recover vmfs volume or datastore

I am in process of moving ESXi to new hardware (ESXi is installed on USB stick with three hard drives)

But as expected none of hardware listed as data store but disks were available.

I tried this before because of lost USB stick in moving when creating data store from available disks didn't formatted hard drive.

The only difference is this time I used Web UI instead of ESXi client.

I am not VMWare expert especially when you lost 1TB of data Smiley Happy

Any help will be much appropriated.

Please let me know if it's recoverable anyhow.

ESXI - 6.5.0 (Build 4564106)

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dbalcaraz
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Hi Gary,

Absolutely, you need a recovery tool in order to try to recover the data.

As you will know, there are a lot recovery tools with Linux ISOs, you could try the famous Hieren's Boot.

Hope it helps.

-------------------------------------------------------- "I greet each challenge with expectation"

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dbalcaraz
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Hi Gary,


So, you have a ESXi installed on a USB stick and when you tried to move the data (partitions) to another HW it doesn't show as listed?

-------------------------------------------------------- "I greet each challenge with expectation"
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a_p_
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What I understand is that you moved the USB stick as well as the disks to a new chassis, and the 3 HDDs are single disks, i.e. no RAID configuration. Is this assumption correct?

In this case find the "Command line" section at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1011387​ to find out whether the datastores are detected as snasphot LUNs.

André

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GaryGhotra
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yes, that's correct...

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GaryGhotra
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thank you for quick reply. Adding or removing hard drive is not problem but now I don't have any data on this drive.

It seems like ESXi UI formatted the hard drive while attaching/mounting in new hardware.

This is really shitting on VMWare side, really a ridiculous approach not able to find it's own formatted drives.

I don't remember the volume name for the snapshot...

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IRIX201110141
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Try the old style.....

esxcfg-volume -l

It lists all volume which are detected as a snapshot. Than you have to write a new signature to.

Regards,

Joerg

GaryGhotra
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Update.

Following this article, VMware Knowledge Base https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2046610

and I am able to get partition,

/vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____ST31000333AS________________________________________5TE03VL1

gpt

121601 255 63 1953525168

Checking offset found at 128:

0110000 d00d c001

0110004

1310000 f15e 2fab

1310004

0131001d  53 65 63 6f 6e 64 44 72  69 76 65 31 54 42 37 32  |SecondDrive1TB72|

0131002d  30 30 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |00..............|

---------------------

but name is showing "SecondDrive1TB72" is one that I provided while trying to mount on new hardware.


Can someone please confirm that I need RECOVERY TOOL here instead of using annoying vmware article to recover partitions?

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dbalcaraz
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Hi Gary,

Absolutely, you need a recovery tool in order to try to recover the data.

As you will know, there are a lot recovery tools with Linux ISOs, you could try the famous Hieren's Boot.

Hope it helps.

-------------------------------------------------------- "I greet each challenge with expectation"
GaryGhotra
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I used Disk Internals and it's showing all file with appropriate file size (0 for older VMS) which is great.

But there are two Hieren's Boot disk available for google search and I looked into them but they have bunch linux tools.

Please let me know which tools you used specifically for this purpose?

Please remember that I need VMFS recovery tool not vmdk file recovery.

Thank you once again for help...

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dbalcaraz
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Sorry for my misunderstanding but I thought you want to recover the files inside the USB.

About the Hiren's boot disk I used Clone disk but to recover vmdk files.

If you want to recover the partition then you can check this article: https://vinfrastructure.it/2013/01/recovering-a-lost-partition-table-with-a-vmfs-datastore/

Yes, it's not easier as other tools but you want to recover a partition, not files...

Hope this helps.

-------------------------------------------------------- "I greet each challenge with expectation"
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