My home built ESXi 4.1 (Free license) server crashed and I had no other option but to do a hard shutdown. Then ESXi would boot but freeze after successfully loading cbt.
I did a repair from ESXi boot CD.
There's only local storage in the server, that consists of two 1TB hard drives (stand-alone, not in array). And there's only a single datastore that spans over both drives. Both drives are same model and somehow I managed to mess it up and did the repair on the 2nd drive which is an extent of the datastore, instead of doing it on the 1st drive which stores the ESXi image. ESXi repair didn't report any errors but it installed an ESXi image on that drive. I did the repair again. This time on the right drive and it reported some errors were fixed, but ESXi would still freeze after loading cbt. I booted ESXi of the 2nd drive and the ESXi would load.
Now I can see 2 data stores in vSphere Client. Datastore1 shows all the virtual machines that were there before and it's size is about 1.85TB just as it was before. Datastore2 has no files and it's size is a bit over 900GB, that's about the size of one drive. It seems datastore2 was created during the repair on wrong drive. I tried to download virtual machine files to a windows physical machine. Some finished downloading, some always get interrupted by unexpected end of stream error. I guess it's files that reside on the extent of datastore1 on the 2nd drive.
I installed both hard drives into a windows machine and mounted their vmfs systems with VMFS driver. Now I can see contents of both datastores in a web browser, but it's the same as it showed in VSphere Client. The VMFS driver also supports mounting extents so I tried to mount both drives, but it throws an exception: LVM UUID does not match.
Is there any way to add the missing extent back to storage1, or at least any way to save VM files that resided on the 2nd drive? Or did doing the repair on the wrong drive erase them for good? I was thinking if there's was a possibilty to make LVM UUID's match, or some other way to "tell" the datastore1 where the missing files reside, maybe by using CLI. But can't find any information on that.
Any help, advice or idea appreciated. Thank you in advance.