ls /vmfs/volumes/5d2a8b2e... → all VMs were there. She restarted the VMs one by one. By 2:30 AM, services were restored.
“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. esxi repair partition table
ESXi Repair Partition Table: A Guide to Datastore Recovery To , you must identify whether the disk uses a legacy MBR or modern GPT label . Most modern VMFS datastores are recovered using the partedUtil command-line utility to manually recreate the missing partition entry at the correct sector offset (usually sector 2048 for GPT or 128 for MBR). Primary Methods for Partition Recovery ls /vmfs/volumes/5d2a8b2e
esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable false echo "All restored. Go to sleep, Lena." By 2:30 AM, services were restored