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

ls /vmfs/volumes/5d2a8b2e... → all VMs were there. She restarted the VMs one by one. By 2:30 AM, services were restored.

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.

esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable false echo "All restored. Go to sleep, Lena." She didn’t sleep. She wrote documentation: “How to repair ESXi partition table using partedUtil – a near-death experience.”

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.