Lost Access to Datastore

M

[MF]Cyber_Punk

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Dec 6, 2003
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So I think I'm totally screwed here but it's a shot in the dark.

I run a ESXi 4.1 Box at home. With 3 HHD's for storage.

Split into 2 separate Datastores.

I've been having issues with 1 VM ( Windows Home Server) locking up and it will cascade down to basically the entire Host system being hung.

Monday morning comes around, ESXi box is locked up again and I go ahead a power cycle it. Comes back up like it normally does, but this time the WHS VM won't Show up or the Datastore for it doesn't come up.

It's only seeing 2 out of the 3 drives in the System ( BIOS level see's all 3 drives) but ESXi only see's 2 drives.

If I go to Config > Storage > Add Storage - It finds the Seagate Drive as basically a new drive and wants to format it, but I know there is data on it so I don't want to format it.

~ # esxcfg-scsidevs -c
Device UID Device Type Console Device Size Multipath PluginDisplay Name
mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 Direct-Access /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 1927MB NMP Local USB Direct-Access (mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0)
t10.ATA_____Hitachi_HDS721010CLA332_______________________JP9930HZ0L8A9H Direct-Access /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____Hitachi_HDS721010CLA332_______________________JP9930HZ0L8A9H 953869MB NMP Local ATA Disk (t10.ATA_____Hitachi_HDS721010CLA332_______________________JP9930HZ0L8A9H)
t10.ATA_____ST31500341AS________________________________________9VS1C37E Direct-Access /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____ST31500341AS________________________________________9VS1C37E 1430799MB NMP Local ATA Disk (t10.ATA_____ST31500341AS________________________________________9VS1C37E)

What can I do to get it to see the Third Drive again?
 
Hopefully the VMFS partition table is lost and that is all. If so you can recreate it by hand.

See http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002281 for a full break down on how to do it. You'll need to use tech support mode, and even though the kb article says ESX4 it will work for ESXi 4.

EDIT: After I reread your post I noticed you said you had 3 drives in 2 VMFS volumes... does that mean you had 1 VMFS volume filling an entire drive, and then another one which used the 3rd drive as an extent? Do you know which of the two VMFS volumes is missing... is it the one that is a combination of 2 drives, or the volume made up of one single drive? That might be more complicated to fix without getting VMware support involve -- which you probably don't have.
 
defuseme2k - Yes

1 Datastore is all on it's own Drive ( The Hitachi Drive)

The Second Datastore is 2 drives with 1 drive as an extent.

The primary drive of the Second Datastore is missing but the secondary ( the Extent drive) shows as the listed drive in the above post.
 
The fact you don't see it when you do a esx-scsidevs -c is very concerning -- I mean that is basically step 1 in sorting out your problem. If you can figure out the naa/eui/mpx identifer for the drive you can potentially run fdisk and recreate the partition table, but it is not nearly as straight forward since you have the extent in there. Frankly, I've never had to do it. While I could probably figure out how -- I dislike giving advice when I haven't actually done something myself.

Still, without it even showing up as an available device when you run esxcfg-scsidevs makes me wonder if the drive isn't failing. I believe when you're going to the 'add storage' option via the vSphere client you're seeing the extent drive there -- not the primary drive as you've said. You can always boot with a live disk, like gparted, just to see if you can "see" the disk that way. I'm not all that hopeful that this is an ESXi specific problem rather than a hardware problem. :(
 
defuseme2k -

Thank you for the suggestions. I ended up using a Linux LiveCD like you said but I couldn't see anything at all on the Drive.

I ended up having to low level format the drive in order for it to be functional again :(

Now, luckly, I had some of the virtual disk's stored on a different datastore than the one that failed. So i can recover some of the data but not all of it.

Just kind of a bummer, I had the extremely important data backed up on an External Drive. But I lost my software library and movies I've collected over the years.
 
I'd run a manufacturer's diagnostic on the drive before I truested it with any of my data. Though it's possible that you just got some corruption from the improper shutdown, that's not a "normal" sort of thing to have happen, at least in my experience.
 
NetJunkie said:
And do your best to never use extents again. Extents bad.
Click to expand...

Agreed.

OP if I were you, I'd try to find a low end raid controller on the HCL. That way you have some redundancy in there too instead of single disks.

Sorry you lost data, that blows big time :(. Hopefully that low level format did the trick long term. As suggested above, usually the drive manufacturer's have a utility or something you can use to test it out, perhaps you could connect the disk to a windows box and try that. Maybe it should be RMA'd... I know I wouldn't trust it without testing it first.
 
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