Problem VM wont reach the logon screen!!

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Hello all,

Need some ideas from people on what I can do with a VM which seems to be experiencing "difficulties"

Brief outline of what happened, my home lab has a SAN setup using starwind, which has a couple of img files on one hard disk (which I will soon be replacing). saw a few disk errors in event logs on PC which houses this disk, so ran some chkdsk, on this disk it found a bad sector in the img which is the SAN all my VMs are housed on.

Anyway, after the chkdsk had finished, I booted up the vms again, and one in particular, a newly created VM which I only created the other day, got past the 2003 loading screen, got to the grey screen, before the CTRL+ALT+DEL bit would appear, none of the status messages appeared in the box though, it just stayed grey. Tried creating a new identical VM and pointing it to the disk from this original VM, but got exactly the same situation. Looked at mounting the VMDK file, so downloaded the VMDK from the datastore, which saved as a vmdk and a flat.vmdk file. Found some free piece of crap software which did nothing, and also tried the VMware mount program, which failed to mount the vmdk, I only need a few files off this VM, dont necessarily need this one to work can create another one, but would really like these files back!

I also read last night about creating a new vm and just going through SSH to copy the flat VMDK file to the new VMDK file or something, but I don't see exactly how this would help!

So, just wondered if anyone had come across similar, or any other suggestions as to how I can get the files I need from this VM.

Ta

 

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Just to update this, I achieved what I needed to, the way I did it in the end was actually very simple (one of those moments where you go... oh... DUH!)

Anyway tried all sorts, editing the VMDK file itself to point to a different file or whatever that method is, that just ended up making things worse, couldn't boot the VM and it wasnt even recognised as a VMDK file! But a bit more fiddling and got it back recognised as a VMDK file again, and the simple answer was, just add it as an additional HDD to another VM, could just browse the drive and get the files I needed then! DOH!

Still, at least good experience I suppose...

One thing which is concerning me however, is the large number of disk errors I am getting now in various VMs, something obviously not right in my setup, I think its the physical drive they are all on, which I am replacing in the next few days... or the slow crappy 100mb link between server & LUNs doesnt help either...

Oh well

 

Thanks for that... My concern is now the whole vcenter setup may be borked, getting loads of "bad sector" warnings in my vcenter VM, when I run a chkdsk on it, it says there is a bad sector in one of the database files, and the vcenter service stops as soon as I start it now, so can't actually connect to vCenter now!

Not the end of the world if I have to start from scratch, only a home lab anyway...

 

I've found that its not unusual for the vcenter service not to stop as soon as it starts from booting, as it relies on sql if the vcenter service comes up before sql does then it will stop. You either need to manually start it or ensure the vcenter service startup options are set to try again a few minutes after a failure.

 

Well I changed the dependencies and added the MSSQL service in to vcenter or whatever the fix is (cant remember now) as I was getting start up errors in Windows, this resolved that.

What is happening now is, I start the service (well it starts itself) and then it immediately stops. I restart it, it stops, I start it, it stops, etc etc... Just returns the wonderfully helpful

"The VMware VirtualCenter Server service terminated with service-specific error 2 (0x2)"

Most of what I find regarding this error is just about the service dependencies fix, nothing to tell me what is actually making this service stop. I assume it is just something inherently wrong with my vCenter install now, going to try a repair install, if that don't work I will just start again probably... on new disks!!!

 

vCenter logs?

 

Where do I find vCenter logs?

 

In here

 

make sure nothing else is bound to the ports vcenter wants to use as this causes that sort of problem
also, 100mb iscsi san? fix that asap lol

 

Do you mean nothing else is using the ports on the vcenter server? There is nothing else at all on this VM, just server2003 with vcenter, so dont think anything else will be using ports.

And yes... I am keeping my eye on some gigabit switches, but have spent so much lately on bits and pieces, selling loads on ebay too so trying to keep a steady flow!

which log should I look at? There is loads of log files, which one is pertitent?

edited,

looking in vpxd-33.log i see this:

[2011-08-31 21:52:52.564 03332 error 'App'] [VdbStatement] SQL execution failed: select VALUE from VPX_TEXT_ARRAY where ARRAY_ID = (?) and TYPE_ID = (?)

and

[2011-08-31 21:52:52.893 03332 error 'App'] An unrecoverable problem has occurred, stopping the VMware VirtualCenter service. Error: Error[VdbODBCError] (-1) "ODBC error: (HY000) - [Microsoft][SQL Native Client][SQL Server]SQL Server detected a logical consistency-based I/O error: incorrect pageid (expected 1:5721; actual 0:0). It occurred during a read of page (1:5721) in database ID 5 at offset 0x00000002cb2000 in file 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\VIM_VCDB.mdf'. Additional messages in the SQL Server error log or system event log may provide more detail. This is a severe error condition that threatens database integrity and must be " is returned when executing SQL statement "select VALUE from VPX_TEXT_ARRAY where ARRAY_ID = (?) and TYPE_ID = (?)"

[2011-08-31 21:52:52.893 03332 info 'App'] Forcing shutdown of VMware VirtualCenter now