This time, the output was beautiful. A single partition, type 6 (which maps to VMFS), starting at sector 2048 , ending at 8796093022207 . Clean. Whole.
But he remembered an old blog post—a relic from the VMware communities, authored by a ghost named “VMTom” who hadn’t posted since 2016. The post was about the backup partition table . VMFS, in its quiet genius, kept a secondary copy of its partition structure at the very end of the LUN. vmfs repair partition table
He stared at the vSphere client. The datastore, labeled DS-Finance-Prod , had a grey question mark icon next to it. The partition table was gibberish. The LUN was there, but VMFS had forgotten how to read itself. This time, the output was beautiful