“Partition table,” she whispered. The previous admin had left no documentation, but she knew ESXi stored its boot banks on a small FAT16 partition, then a core dump partition, then a VMFS data partition. If the GPT table got corrupted, the host would see the disk as raw.
Then: esxcfg-volume -l → “VMFS UUID 5d2a8b2e-fc0f2b10-1234-7845c4f5a9b1” appeared. esxi repair partition table
It was 2:00 AM when Lena’s phone buzzed with the alert she dreaded most: . All VMs on that host had frozen. She’d been the new senior sysadmin for only three weeks. “Partition table,” she whispered
She logged into the DCIM console. The HP ProLiant DL380 was still running, but the local VMFS datastore was inaccessible. She tried ls /vmfs/volumes/ — empty. She’d been the new senior sysadmin for only three weeks
esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable false echo "All restored. Go to sleep, Lena." She didn’t sleep. She wrote documentation: “How to repair ESXi partition table using partedUtil – a near-death experience.”