Running ESXi v7/VCSA v7...
Using Dell Internal Dual SD card for ESXi boot. One of the cards failed and I replaced it with exact same make and model but it must be a different batch because Dell BIOS complains the new card is smaller than the card I am replacing, thus it won't let me re-build to it. It does indeed seem the new card is a few MB smaller than the original card. I have two of these new cards though which do match of course so want to migrate ESXi install to those.
I was able to clone my original still working card 1 to new card 1 using an HDD block cloning software on windows. ESXi actually boots off this new cloned card and Dell BIOS then copies that card to new card 2 and says mirror is functional again.
ESXi boots back fully, connects to vCenter, everything works, EXCEPT it complains that there is no core dump location set anymore. However, the scratch config advanced setting for that host stills is filled with the datastore I had scratch going to, but the "current" scratch location advanced setting reads "/scratch". If I change the config scratch location to another folder or other datastore, it takes the change, I go to maintenance mode and reboot, and system comes back up still saying current location is "/scratch". Not only that, but the config location is now set back to the original datastore folder it was on. So, something is not letting me chage scratch setting anymore and something is not honoring the configured location, and it's defaulting to "/scratch". Everything else works fine, it's just this problem not letting me set or change scratch away from "/scratch". The datastore that scratch was going to and it claims is set to still, is still there, available working, and unchanged during this entire process.
If I boot ESXi back up with the original card 1, all works normally and scratch can be changed.
Is there a way to reset scratch settings somehow? Something is messed up during the clone I guess with that? It's just strange that every time I reboot it persists to the original configured scratch location, even if I change it, and even so it doesn't even use that location, it sets current to "/scratch" and shows the error on vCenter about no core dump location being configured.