VMware Cloud Community
mlb7225
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-17-2011 02:40 PM

ESXi 4.0 hangs on startup after multiextent loaded successfully

Running ESXi 4.0 on a Dell T7400. VM's stored on RAID5 array. Had one of the drives crash this morning. This happened once before and things ran slow, but they ran. This time, as the bad drive is attempting to rebuild itself, ESXi will not boot up. It starts to load everything just fine, then when it gets to 'muliextent loaded successfully', it just sits there. I am having a new drive over nighted but what do I do about ESXi not booting?

Please help, this is a production box!!!

Thank you,

Mike

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8 Replies
DSTAVERT
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-17-2011 03:29 PM

I would use VMware support directly for this.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator
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mlb7225
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-17-2011 03:37 PM

Okay, will do. Thank you!

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DSTAVERT
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-17-2011 03:41 PM

Good luck. Hope it goes well for you.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator
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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-17-2011 05:42 PM

good luck to you too, do report back as i'm keen on the resolution.

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mlb7225
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-18-2011 08:20 AM

Well, it turns out support was never established on my purchase last year, there fore VM Support team cannot help me.

Can I reinstall ESXi 4.0 again w/o corrupting my datastores which hold the VM's?

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mlb7225
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-18-2011 09:05 AM

I attempted to do a repair first, here is a screen shot of the error encountered.

IMAG0756.jpg

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mlb7225
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-21-2011 09:16 AM

Well, to update on my issue. When one of the drives in my RAID 5 failed, it caused the host to fail as well. Not sure why to be honest. I have previously had a drive fail in RAID 5 with no issues except for a little lost in performance. Esxi is installed on a different array, RAID1, the VM's themselves however, do reside on the RAID 5 array. I replaced the failed drive then had to 'repair' the install of esxi on the RAID1 array. All seems to be working now except for 1, and only 1 of the 12 VM's can't seem to find its HD when booting up. I am researching that issue now. If anyone knows a possible fix, please resond. Smiley Happy

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EXO3AW
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎03-22-2011 08:35 AM

When was that screen taken ?

After a normal boot ? A repair install ?

The screent tells that your ESX simply has a bad filesystem on one of its partitions / drives.

If you have recent backups of these LUNS, i'd check what datastore resides on the mentioned naa. devices (esxcfg-scsidevs -m or it's pendant) and maybe try to run an fsck on it.

But then again, it could be of no use at all ... Smiley Sad  .. very difficult to predict but good luck ... i feel with you.

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