I was called after a neglected vSphere server went down. Won't boot, but BIOS info shows all drives with no S.M.A.R.T. errors. Boot volume is RAID 5 and 2nd volume is RAID 1.
My only hope is to boot ESXi or a utility to a flash drive and hope that it's a matter that can be addressed by cleaning up to volume (perhaps it MAXed out). But as far as I can tell, ESXi doesn't allow such disk operations even if you can boot to a flash drive. Any ideas?
I've used utilities like Partition Manager for other OSs, but they don't accommodate VMware's proprietary VMFS filesystem. Is there a tool that does?
I believe it is ESXi v 5.1 as it was last updated in 2013.
Yes, I do have access to the keys and (I think) VMware install files for this server.
Thanks,
Bob