Dear community,
I have a very critical issue regarding my ESXi installation and VMFS datastore.
Here is the story:
- ESXi 5.0 (free) installed on IBM 3650 with adaptec 8k RAID controller and 6xHDD (1 was hotspare).
- Two RAID-5 arrais - first was 5GB size, where was my ESX installation, second - ~1,8T where was my VMDK files.
- I have a 1 production virtual machine, which is very important for me to recover.
- Yesterday my motherboard or RAID controller has failed which forced me to shut down the ESX host.
- I have moved my HDD to other working server. RAID-5 array rebuilds w/o problems (I had a hotspare disk).
- After RAID rebuilds, i have tried to boot to my hypervisor, but error message appears: BANK5: not a VMware boot bank. No hypervisor found.
- Then I have installed ESXi 5.1U1 on USB disk, booted from it and found that the ESX doesnt recognize the datastore.
So, i think that VMFS is corrupted in some way, hopefully the partition table is broken. I have found this thread (https://communities.vmware.com/thread/391750?start=15&tstart=0) but I am afraid to execute the guidance there, since it concern the specific case.
Currently I am in the ESX CLI (via installer) and have the following information:
- partedUtil getptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba1 :C0 :T1 :L0
msdos
242480 255 63 3895451648
Can you assist me how to proceed further so i can normally access/recover my VMFS volume and run my important virtual machine again?