VCB: I forgot all about “automount disable” what now?
Filed under: VMware
Before installing VCB and connecting the proxy host to the SAN you should disable automount via diskpart(cmd, diskpart, automount disable, automount scrub). When you don’t disable automount Windows will signature all “incoming” disks. When this happens the VMware hosts will not recognize the VMFS volumes anymore. But fortunately you can re-label the luns as VMFS.
Check with “fdisk -lu” what the current ID value is of the volumes, it’s “SFS” if Windows wrecked it. Write all the devices down and label them again as VMFS:
fdisk /dev/sd? (? the letter for that specific volume)
p
d
n
p
1
default
t
fb
X
b
1
128 (disk alignment, check your SAN manual for the correct value, 128 is correct in most cases…)
W
Now rescan the HBA devices, esxcfg-rescan vmhba0 etc etc.




February 19th, 2008 at 16:44
[…] via Duncan, here’s some good information on recovering VMFS partitions when you’ve forgotten to set “automount disable” on […]