This post is a deep dive into recovering a lost or corrupted VMFS partition table. I’ll cover theory, common causes, diagnostic tools, and step-by-step recovery procedures. A VMFS datastore lives inside a primary partition (type 0xFB for VMFS3 or 0xFC for VMFS5/6) on a disk or LUN. The partition table (usually GPT, sometimes MBR on older systems) sits at the very beginning of the disk (LBA 0) and contains a small entry pointing to the start sector and length of that VMFS partition.
partedUtil get /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6001234567890 If you see Unknown or an empty table, the partition table is missing. Use vmkfstools to scan for VMFS superblocks without relying on the partition table: vmfs partition table recovery
partedUtil get /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6001234567890 If it shows a table but complains about checksum, you may repair the primary from the backup (see recovery section). Method A: Restore partition table from a known backup (Best case) If you have a backup of your ESXi host configuration (e.g., from vicfg-cfgbackup ), you might have saved the partition layouts. Or if you have another identical datastore, compare. This post is a deep dive into recovering