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My ESXi installation got corrupted (I get the Pink Screen of Death) and I would like to extract my VM info from the HDD. When I plug in into my Linux box I see 4 small partitions that does not have any VM info, and there is other 2 partitions that Linux does not recognize that are very big. Gparted listed them as 'Unknown' and fdisk says it doesn't recognize them either.

Is there a way to get the VM info from this HDD?

Thanks!

user886869
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    Do you know what the datastores were formatted as? That's the most important detail. VMFS would be typical, and you can see those filesystems in Linux with the vmfs-tools package. Can't tell you how to do that without knowing what distribution you're using, though. – Spooler Oct 03 '16 at 04:14
  • if you were using Ubuntu you can use this guide to manage VMFS http://microitblog.com/micro-it-blog/2011/05/28/mounting-vmfs-with-ubuntu – chojayr Oct 03 '16 at 06:51
  • Hi @SmallLoanOf1M I used that package but I needed to update it because the original from the repo was outdated! Thanks – user886869 Oct 04 '16 at 15:09

1 Answers1

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I ended up using the tutorial on: http://woshub.com/how-to-access-vmfs-datastore-from-linux-windows/

Thanks to @SmallLoanOf1M for pointing me on the right direction. At first 'fdisk' do not return the partition type because it was in GPT mode, and 'fdisk' does not work with those. And the command 'parted -l' does not returned the partition type of all of the ESXi hard drive.

I needed to install the package vmfs-tools:

apt-get install vmfs-tools

But since I was using ESXi 5.5 the vmfs-tools package was outdated and didnt had the support for VMFS 5, so I needed to install it manually:

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/v/vmfs-tools/vmfs-tools_0.2.5-1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i vmfs-tools_0.2.5-1_amd64.deb

After that, to mount the HDD was as easy as:

mkdir /mnt/vm_hdd
vmfs-fuse /dev/sdb3 /mnt/vm_hdd
cd /mnt/vm_hdd

To read the virtual hdd inside the datastore I used 'guestmount'.

user886869
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