To recover a VMFS 6 datastore, you'll need:
VMFS 6 uses a unique signature to identify the file system. The signature is located at the beginning of the datastore. Use a tool like dd to read the first 512 bytes of the device:
Before jumping into data extraction, use built-in VMware tools to diagnose the health of the datastore: recover vmfs 6 datastore
Recovering a VMFS 6 datastore requires identifying whether the issue is a simple "unmounted" state or a deeper partition/metadata corruption. For a successful recovery, you generally follow a tiered approach from non-destructive rescanning to advanced third-party software extraction. 1. Initial Diagnosis and Rescan Before using specialized tools, check if the ESXi host can see the storage device and simply needs to refresh its inventory. Rescan Storage
Replace /dev/sdX with the affected device and 1T with the desired datastore size. To recover a VMFS 6 datastore, you'll need:
If the datastore does not appear in esxcfg-volume -l , the next step is scanning for VMFS headers:
Accidental deletion from the vCenter inventory or overwriting during an ESXi upgrade. Articles - VMFS Recovery For a successful recovery, you generally follow a
Often caused by ESXi host crashes (PSOD) or sudden power loss during journaling updates.
Refresh storage on every ESXi host that can see the LUN to ensure the datastore isn't just temporarily hidden.
If you want to rebuild the VMFS 6 datastore, you can use the vmfs-tools package to create a new datastore:
esxcfg-volume -l