I'm running ESXi and just recently rebuilt a raid array, and now an existing local datastore is no longer accessable in ESXi. The details:
Original Configuration:
- 1x usb drive (on the backplane) containing esxi 5.1 install.
- 2x local SAS drives in hw raid1 configured as datastore1. Also contained scratch space for esxi.
- 3x local SATA drives in hw raid 5, configured as datastore2.
New Configuration
- Using the datastore browser, I moved all VMs and files from datastore1 to datastore2, entered maintenance mode and shutdown the server.
- I added a (3rd) sas drive to the server, deleted the raid1 array and built a raid5 array with the 3 SAS disks.
I most definitely didn't touch the 3x SATA drives in the existing raid5 array at this point.
So, now I reboot the server and have no persistent datastores. At this point I expected to still have datastore2 (the 3x SATA drives that now contains my vms/data). I then exit maintenance mode, recreate datastore1 on the SAS raid5 array, configure Scratch space on datastore1 and reboot.
Still no datastore2. I rescanned, nothing. When I go to
"add storage" -> "disk/Lun" -> select the SATA array -> Select VMFS-5, I see the warning:A partition will be created and used. At this point, I cancelled out prior to changing partition information.Any idea what happened, and how to recover the datastore on the SATA array?
