Hi All,

In my server I have 8x 1.5TB SATA drives running off a PERC 6/i in RAID 6 which contains my entire VM environment at home. I replaced a failed disk last night and to cut a long story short I somehow managed to replace the wrong disk in my array and have rebuilt using the failed disk. This rebuild somehow succeeded, but it appears to have corrupted at least the ESXi boot partition as I get this error;



I am really in a tight spot as I have all my photos stored on a VM, and when the disk failed it was about 200GB through a 230GB online backup.

Obvious question from me is, what does this error mean and most importantly how do I recover from it without loosing my VM's?

ESXi is installed on it's own 1.6GB partition, with the rest of the space split into datastores which is used exclusively by my VM's. Would really, really appreciate some help here.

If you ask me, just reinstall the esxi from CD to the 1.6Gb partition you have, and re-add the virtual machines back from the datastores and run them - of course if your data on the datstores is in better shape that the boot one - worth trying.

It's a syslinux error so you might want to do some searching on - SYSLINUX EBIOS Load error boot error.

Besides the repair option you could try to boot from USB or use MOA from sanbarrow.com to boot up an ESXi install and then access the data.

Thanks for the replies guys. Had a look around for that error, but couldn't find too much on it in the way of solutions, and very little on it in relation to ESXi.

I think I'll try booting off a USB stick, and then see what I can see. Hopefully it is just something wrong with the boot partition. If I am able to access my ESXi boot partition, what files do I need to back off onto the USB stick to then be able to do a repair install and restore of my environment? There is not going to be anything I can do for the VM's themselves as I don't have anything I can back 8TB worth of data onto.

I'm hoping that by getting my ESXi boot partition back into the same state it was pre-corruption that when I start up the server my VM's won't even be aware that anything has gone wrong.

The official supported way would be to run the repair process from the install CD, patch to the same level that you were running and then restore the ESXi configuration backup .

If you boot from USB you can mount the datastore, register the VM and then see if your data is OK before you start to mess with the installed version. If you don't have a config backup you could also use the USB boot to mount (should be possible) and get the state.tgz config backup. Otherwise you can boot with a live CD and get the file.

Thanks for your help again Dave! Hopefully it all goes well.

Out of interest, is there any easy way you can effectively clone an ESXi host to a USB?

I haven't tried to clone from disk to USB. I would probably just do a fresh install and then restore a backup (or copy state.tgz).

How are you making out with accessing the VMs?

Still at square one. Got myself a 4GB Sandisk Cruzer USB stick as it was the smallest capacity wise they had at my local shop. I uninstalled U3 and installed ESXi onto it but found I could not boot from it on any of my computers.

Found a blog post suggesting that my Gigabyte board might be having an issue due to the partition numbering. Mad the changes as advised there and while my PC with an Asrock motherboard boots from my USB stick quite happily, my Gigabyte EX58-UD4P doesn't want to know about it. Have double checked and swapped around USB support settings in the BIOS with no effect. I can see that the USB key is detected during POST, however it just won't boot from it. Looking like I'll have to attempt a repair at this rate.

Well, that was unintuitive. After pressing the F12 key during boot to get the boot menu, it turns out that on my Gigabyte board you have to select HDD, and not USB-HDD to boot from a USB stick. After selecting HDD a submenu is opened up showing all the devices I suppose the BIOS considers to be HDD's.

Have now booted ESXi off my USB stick, and have been able to view my datastores which from what I can see appear to be intact. Just need to get this state.tgz file off. I gather to restore this file is just a matter of copying it back onto my repaired ESXi installation?

Also, exactly what is contained in my state.tgz? I know all the config details pertaining specific VM's is contained in the datastores. What about resource pools and resource pool memberships?

Ok, 1am in the morning and things really aren't making sense to me now. So I can see my old ESXi install partion, however I can access it. I assume I need to mount the naa device? If so how do I go about this?

I tried adding the ESXi install parition as a datastore to make browsing easy through the VI client, however it says it can't do it without wiping the data.