Hi all,

I had an issue where I lost connectivity to my ESXi machine, and it looked like the vSphere itself was the culprit. After being unable to connect to it or operate it directly from the terminal, I hard reset the machine.

It turned out that a faulty switch was to blame for a lack of connectivity, and I’d plugged the terminal output into the main VGA out (which was giving a BIOS message as an output), not realising there was a DVI graphics card in the machine as well (where the VMware hypervisor was outputting).

So, the hard reset was totally pointless. Unfortunatley, when the machine came back up, one of my datastores had gone.

The ESXi web console shows the storage as still being there, and will also show the partition. partedUtil states that the partition table is fine, but if I try to mount it, I’m told that the volume doesn’t exist.

I then ran

voma -m vmfs -f check -d [diskname]

And received the following message:

Running VMFS Checker version 2.1 in check mode              

Initializing LVM metadata, Basic Checks will be done        

         ERROR: IO failed: Input/output error               

   VOMA failed to check device : IO error                   

Total Errors Found:           0

   Kindly Consult VMware Support for further assistance

Is this drive toast? It has some data on it that I would like to retrieve.

Any advice greatly appreciated!

Chris.