She didn’t panic. ESXi has a built-in repair tool: partedUtil fix but only if you know the original partition layout. She didn’t. She did have one clue: a working identical host in the same cluster.

Then: esxcfg-volume -l → “VMFS UUID 5d2a8b2e-fc0f2b10-1234-7845c4f5a9b1” appeared.

She opened a remote SSH session. First, she verified the disk: esxcli storage core device list → mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0 – 500GB.

Then she used partedUtil get /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0 – it returned garbage: partitions overlapping, wrong end sectors.

Her hands were still shaking, but she smiled. The partition table repair had worked.

It was 2:00 AM when Lena’s phone buzzed with the alert she dreaded most: . All VMs on that host had frozen. She’d been the new senior sysadmin for only three weeks.

She logged into the DCIM console. The HP ProLiant DL380 was still running, but the local VMFS datastore was inaccessible. She tried ls /vmfs/volumes/ — empty.

The command completed silently. She held her breath and typed: partedUtil get … – the table matched the healthy host.