Good luck, and may your sector scans be clean. Have your own VMFS partition table horror story or recovery trick? Share it in the comments.
This post is a deep dive into recovering a lost or corrupted VMFS partition table. I’ll cover theory, common causes, diagnostic tools, and step-by-step recovery procedures. A VMFS datastore lives inside a primary partition (type 0xFB for VMFS3 or 0xFC for VMFS5/6) on a disk or LUN. The partition table (usually GPT, sometimes MBR on older systems) sits at the very beginning of the disk (LBA 0) and contains a small entry pointing to the start sector and length of that VMFS partition.
vmkfstools -V --config /scratch/config Or more directly: vmfs partition table recovery
esxcfg-info -s | grep -i vmfs Better yet, use the hidden voma tool (VMFS Offline Metadata Analyzer) in read-only mode:
No recovery method replaces a verified backup. Use this knowledge to survive the crisis, then immediately double-check your 3-2-1 backup strategy. Good luck, and may your sector scans be clean
When that partition table gets corrupted or deleted, ESXi sees the raw disk as a blank, unpartitioned device. However, the actual VMFS filesystem metadata (heartbeats, file descriptors, block pointers) lives inside the partition, untouched.
Check partition table:
partedUtil get /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6001234567890 If it shows a table but complains about checksum, you may repair the primary from the backup (see recovery section). Method A: Restore partition table from a known backup (Best case) If you have a backup of your ESXi host configuration (e.g., from vicfg-cfgbackup ), you might have saved the partition layouts. Or if you have another identical datastore, compare.