Vmfs Partition Table Recovery May 2026

When that partition table gets corrupted or deleted, ESXi sees the raw disk as a blank, unpartitioned device. However, the actual VMFS filesystem metadata (heartbeats, file descriptors, block pointers) lives inside the partition, untouched.

esxcfg-info -s | grep -i vmfs Better yet, use the hidden voma tool (VMFS Offline Metadata Analyzer) in read-only mode: vmfs partition table recovery

Good luck, and may your sector scans be clean. Have your own VMFS partition table horror story or recovery trick? Share it in the comments. When that partition table gets corrupted or deleted,

Check partition table:

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. Have your own VMFS partition table horror story

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:

dd if=/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6001234567890 bs=512 count=1 skip=END_SECTOR_NUMBER | hexdump -C | grep "EFI PART" But skip math is error-prone. Instead, use partedUtil :