ESXi 5.0 sees img drive as empty

[scorpico]

Hello, we recently had a failed RAID 5 where the img file was located. after rebuilding the raid 5 and getting the img file of the hard drive, i tried to add it to starwind. that part worked fine, and had no issue. in vmware after rescanning for new storage devices and trying to add it i get the same screen i would get if the hard drive was blank with one difference:
Partion format "Unknown" The Hard disk is blank

I tried to repaire the file from the vmware console doing the following:
first i identify the drive:
fdisk -l

Disk /dev/disks/eui.f06d8f7d2432b633: 2097.1 GB, 2097152000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 254964 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

then i try:
partedUtil fix /dev/disks/eui.f06d8f7d2432b633
Error: Unable to open /dev/disks/eui.f06d8f7d2432b633 - unrecognised disk label.


any ideas on a utility or a way to try to fix the file system inside the img? it doesn't matter if i have to extract the files from inside that in a different way and then load them again to another img file through vmware.

thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

Cesar

[Max (staff)]

Hello Cesar,
Please let me know if this img has been previously used in an HA set,
there is a specific procedure for recovering those.

[scorpico]

Hello Max,

No, it was created when we were using ESX 4.0 with vmfs 3.0 format. and was just a normal shared store between a couple of ESX hosts.
is there any tool you have that can repair it if it got corrupted and then be able to open it and pull what's inside? their should be a bunch of folders with vmdk, each folder was a VM.

thank you
Cesar

[Max (staff)]

We do not have tools to repair broken VMFS volumes unfortunately.
I would recommend to call VMWare support and see what they can do to restore the volume.
I guess the problem is with the volume IDs, ESX thinks it's new but in reality the data is intact.