Recover Vmfs Partition Table May 2026

On ESXi:

esxcfg-volume -l If the disk shows a known VMFS UUID but not mounted, try:

Now create partition:

vim-cmd hostsvc/datastore/info If automatic restore fails, you may need to manually recover the partition starting sector. Find the VMFS superblock offset VMFS superblock is typically located at sector 128 (1MB offset, 512-byte sectors). Use dd and hexdump :

VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a high-performance cluster file system designed for storing virtual machine files, including disks, snapshots, and configuration data. The partition table on a VMFS datastore is a critical component that defines where the VMFS volume begins and ends on the physical LUN or disk.

If the partition table becomes corrupted—due to accidental overwriting, failed resizing operations, controller issues, or human error—the datastore becomes inaccessible, and all VMs hosted on it appear lost. The good news: In many cases, without data loss.