Updating ESX 3.5 to 4.0: PANIC: Failed to find HD boot partition
In September I successfully updated a ESXi 3.5 host to ESXi 4.0.
A week ago I needed to upgrade another server,
so I thought no need backing up de VM's this time before doing the upgrade.
Of course, with no backup the upgrade failed, the ESXi server rebooted after performing the upgrade with vSphere and came up with the following message:
PANIC: Failed to find HD boot partition.
Before trying the repair wizard on the ESXi 3.5 CD, I backup-ed all VM's to another machine over the network using an Ubuntu Live CD, how to mount the VMFS store:
- In the software sources, enable the Universe library and reload the packages
- Open a terminal: su
- apt-get install vmfs-tools
- mkdir /vmdir/
- vmfs-fuse /vmdir/ /dev/sda3 (look up your sda, in gparted f.e.)
Also useful to know to fasten the backup:
- Mounting a Samba share to a dir:
apt-get install smbfs
sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=usernamePC,password=ShareAccessPassword,workgroup=MSHOME,gid=smb,uid=$USER,fmask=770,dmask=770,rw "//DEVMACHINE/Share with Spaces" /createdDir
So, after creating a backup, I tried the ESX 3.5 repair wizard, wich is useless, it re-installs ESX and leaves the VMFS store unallocated.
I then just installed ESXi 4 (that formats the full disk)
Second problem: I started VSphere update client, when scanning for updates I get:
The scan operation has failed... Check the logs.
The problem wasn't very known on the internet, so I just reinstalled a second time. Surprisingly the problem disappeared and updates where installed correctly.
Then I just installed VMware converter on the backup PC to re-import the VM's to the ESXi server in the new VMware 7 format.