It’s quite possible that the metadata is fubar however there is some promise since it does have an fb partition. I would try creating a USB ESXi 4 boot stick and try adding the store from that disk. Or you could throw in a scratch disk an install ESX and then bring in the Perc. If the volume has usable metadata ESX 4 will give you the option to resig it on the add function.

Regards,
Mike

I hope you can help. I had a Dell server with Perc4i raid. The system was setup Raid1 on the front (datastore1) and 6×36GB Raid5 for (datastore2). I had 2 drives go down in the datastore2 taking all of my VMs with it. I forced one of the drives back online and then did a rebuild on the 2nd drive which seems to be successful. During the drive problems I rebooted the ESX 3.5 server and it saved a new configuration that did not include datastore2. I have tried resignature on the datastore but ESX still does not see the volume. I can see the LUN and doing fdisk -lu /dev/sdb does show there is still a partition of fb type. The /vmfs/volumes folder only has mapping for datastore1. Rescanning using both the VMclient and commandline vmkfstools -s does not show the volume in the VMclient. Any ideas on my next step. At this point I just want to be able to mount the partition and recover the data off it. I have tried the java vmfs driver with Knoppix live cd and no luck. Any help is appreciated.

Thats not good. If cp returns invalid argument it means that the vmfs path is not recognized as a valid file system. VMFS is damaged. You may have luck using the open source java based vmfs product.
You cannot run it on ESXi, you will need ESX so you can install it and java.

Regards
Mike

Don’t you know about some vmfs data recovery, something that can raw copy the data?

thanks
Michal

I think you need to try a cp of the Debian-flat.vmdk and Debian.vmdk files to your datastore2 volume from a ssh connection of the ESXi host. vmkfstools seems to be cranky.

Regards,
Mike

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/virtuals/Debian/Debian.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore2/Debian/debian.vmdk
Destination disk format: VMFS zeroedthick
Failed to open ‘/vmfs/volumes/virtuals/Debian/Debian.vmdk’: Invalid argument (1441801).

I’m starting to think, that there si a data problem with the files that were open during run of virtual machine…but I still hope, there is a possibility to recover the data.

Thanks

Michal

If the command ‘vmkfstools -B …’ didn’t help then try cloning the vmdk file using the vmkfstools utility. Typically a lock is placed on a vmdk to allow safe writes from one cluster member so a read should be allowed. If that works you can rename the files and use the clone instead.

Regards,
Mike

thanks

Michal

It is possible to recover vmdks from a vmfs file system however it’s not normally done when the meta files are destroyed. Initializing a vmfs volume on install creates new meta files and overwrites the block allocation tables. So unless you made a copy of them it’s very unlikely that the vmdks are recoverable.

Regards,
Mike

We have problem with ESX 4.0 server. ESX 4.0 hand up with purple screen error, and VMs were not able to ping or connect. Unfortunately we reloaded with over wrting vmfs. Is there is any method to recover VMs.

Thanks,
Ravi