Help needed (VSPHERE), vm's inacessible /iscsi san datastore failed to get partition information

[PedroPaula]

Here is my question details:

We have an EMC AX 4 with 1 initial Virtual disk of 2,2TB shared with 2 ESX and 1 VCenter (physical Windows Server 2003). Acidentally the same VMFS Datastore LUN has been shared with the Virtual Center Server and formatted as a Basic Disk NTFS.

Obviously we now see all the VMs as inacessible and trying to add the lost Datastore it gives the message:

We have tried to use some tools but without sucess, parted is the one we are trying to use (the command parted rescue start end), since the actual partition seen by ESX us an EFI GPT/Basic Disk/NTFS – cant be changed or corrected via fdisk.

Can anybody help or suggest any tools for undeletion, etc??

Regards.

[geddam]

There are very less scope of recovery for this type of issues.....

You need to create VMFS partition manually from host considering which is start block and which is stored block.....

You can refer the below KB for this...

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1001489

Thanks,,

Ramesh. Geddam,

VCP 3&4, MCTS(Hyper-V).

Please award points, if helpful

[PedroPaula]

Ok, but in your oppinion what should i do with the current NTFS partition? There's no possibility of creating a new partition since total space is allocated to Basic disk NTFS...

I already contacted some software companies like ontrack, still waiting for an answer...

I guess my problem was not using data recovery before specific operations but what could i do now?

I also have the parted rescue start-end command but since i have now this crumpy ntfs formatted partition...i just want to rollback...

Should i delete this partition from the windows machine right now? And try to recover after that?

Should i place recover anything with the parted command?

What about any VMFS undelete tool?

Regards.

[geddam]

Thats an expected behaviour any filesystem which takes over the partition, shows disk space as empty. I have a crude way of recovering VMFS which worked for few of my customers.

VMFS Undelete tool will not work here if NTFS has formatted the partition...

Initially let me know couple of things here.....

1. When this LUN was presented to Windows box, did you just initialized it or performed a complete initialization and quick format?

2. How many times did you tried recreating VMFS partition by using Add storage option?

VMware officially doesn't support VMFS recovery. If you think you want to a give it a try .....let us know your details....

Thanks,,

Ramesh. Geddam,

VCP 3&4, MCTS(Hyper-V).

Please award points, if helpful

[PedroPaula]

Hi,

I think that it was complete initialization and quick format (not full definitely).

Since this i tried to add the same datastore to ESX a couple of times, of course it cant be added for the partition table error....

What type of details do you need? Is there any guarantee on data recovery?

Regards.

[geddam]

There is no guarantee on recovery, however we can give it a try.....

Thanks,,

Ramesh. Geddam,

rameshgeddam@gmail.com

VCP 3&4, MCTS(Hyper-V).

Please award points, if helpful