Hi all,
we had a power outage that seems to have damaged our old ESXI (5.0.0) installation, the SSD (single drive, not part of a RAID) we used for it seems unreadable and hence all guest systems are shown as "unknown".
I tried to access the SSD by attaching it to a linux machine (via USB) and to use vmfs-fuse. Unfortunately it shows me:
VMFS VolInfo: invalid magic number 0x00000000
VMFS: Unable to read volume information
Trying to find partitions
Unable to open device/file "/dev/md126".
Unable to open filesystem
The magic number looks no good, what I already found out.
We have a new server in place already (esxi 6.5.0) where I, prior to trying the above, attached the drive, activated it as volume on the controller (without initialising it) and bootet it up. Esxi recognizes the drive but NOT the data on it, so no partition information / datastore. It could be due to the big version jump or just because the drive is toast.
Any chances I can recover the vmdk files on the drive? Anything left I could try? We have backups on client-level, yes, but the data of the last almost 24 hours is not part of the backup, so I would really appreciate getting at least the content of the databases from there.
Any help and/or hint are highly appreciated.