After spending the last two days upgrading a lot of ESXi servers on the last one I was tired already so I didn't back up its boot drive.
I started the upgrade from vCenter, staged it, pre-checked remediation, remediated--green checkmarks all around. When the server came back on though, it wasn't able to boot from the drive. It seems the bootloader got lost or something. I enabled BIOS booting (it was on EFI before) to see if it picked it up but still didn't boot.
I checked the drive on my computer and I got this:
bash-3.2# diskutil list /dev/disk4 (external, physical): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *15.8 GB disk4 1: EFI BOOT 104.9 MB disk4s1 2: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTBANK1 1.1 GB disk4s5 3: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTBANK2 1.1 GB disk4s6 4: 4EB2EA39-7855-4790-A79E-FAE495E21F8D 13.5 GB disk4s7
And with this info I found online it seems the data should be there either in diskXs5 or diskXs6. I also dded an image just in case:
bash-3.2# dd if=/dev/disk4 of=./hyperserver1.img bs=4096 3855360+0 records in 3855360+0 records out 15791554560 bytes transferred in 1292.042925 secs (12222159 bytes/sec)
Could I just reinstall ESXi from scratch so I get a drive with a good bootloader and then copy BOOTBANK1& BOOTBANK2 to it or is there some check that would let only ESXi write to it? From a Mac, ownership information just says _unknown so I'm not exactly sure how --if-- I can set it back:
bash-3.2# ls -l total 330624 drwxrwxrwx 1 _unknown _unknown 32768 Jun 14 11:19 .Spotlight-V100 drwxrwxrwx 1 _unknown _unknown 32768 Jun 14 11:19 .fseventsd drwxrwxrwx 1 _unknown _unknown 32768 Jun 14 2020 System Volume Information -rwxrwxrwx 1 _unknown _unknown 135334 Jun 14 2020 b.b00 -rwxrwxrwx 1 _unknown _unknown 197255 Jun 14 2020 bnxtnet.v00 -rwxrwxrwx 1 _unknown _unknown 93512 Jun 14 2020 bnxtroce.v00 -rwxrwxrwx 1 _unknown _unknown 1500 Jun 14 2020 boot.cfg -rwxrwxrwx 1 _unknown _unknown 600424 Jun 14 2020 brcmfcoe.v00 -rwxrwxrwx 1 _unknown _unknown 32244 Jun 14 2020 brcmnvme.v00 ...
If I can't recover, would the data on the disks be admitted back to the vSAN cluster if the host information is a "new" host?
Thanks for your help!