Recovering a lost or corrupt VMFS partition table on an ESXi host is a high-stakes operation. Because VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is a proprietary, high-performance clustered file system, standard Linux partition recovery tools often fail or, worse, destroy the data structure.
:Access the ESXi host via SSH and locate the identifier for the affected physical disk: Command: ls /vmfs/devices/disks/
ESXi includes a built-in utility specifically designed for this scenario: vmfsfstools . It can scan a raw disk device, locate the VMFS volume header, and rewrite the partition table to match. esxi recover vmfs partition table
A corrupted disk will often return an error or show no partition entries.
VMFS typically starts at sector (1MB offset), but older versions or custom configurations might differ. Recovering a lost or corrupt VMFS partition table
vmfsfstools -R /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6005076300810186d00000000000001
Recovering a VMFS partition table is a non-destructive process when using the correct tools. The vmfsfstools utility remains the safest and most effective method for restoration. It can scan a raw disk device, locate
If vmfsfstools fails to automatically recover the partition, the issue may be that the partition start offset is non-standard (e.g., the LUN previously had a different OS on it).