Today, I stupidly attempted to re-size the default 6GB drive to something larger. ESXi errored trying to make the change, so I figured I missed something, powered it back on, and got put in to a boot loop where I get the following error:
Eventually it shuts down and goes back to the boot menu:
I’ve found a number of other threads with similar errors, but it seems a fresh install is where everyone ended up… soooo…
I fished all of my config files out of the old VMDK directly (yeah, I fail, I didn’t have backups configured). Then I attempted to follow the same guide to create a new instance of Home Assistant. But I’m getting stuck on the step " Clone the VMDK using the following command: *vmkfstools -i “hassos_ova-2.8.vmdk” “hassos_ova-2.8_new.vmdk” (This creates a thick copy of the disk and avoids locking/snapshot issues with the virtual disk)"
ESXi outputs the error:
DiskLib_Check() failed for source disk The system cannot find the file specified (25).
So, my old instance is hosed and I can’t seem to get a new one up and running. Anyone have an idea how to fix my original instance? Seems it’s just something with the partitioning, but I have zero idea how to fix it. Mark mentioned in one of his posts related to that guide that he expanded the disk by running ‘df’ but I can’t seem to get that to work from the console.
If I can’t salvage the old instance, any idea why this guide for ESXi isn’t working? It did before (I think) without extra steps not outlined in the guide.
Well, That was fun. I have it fixed and I want to share what I did for others that might run in to this issue. I saw a number of people with related errors that never found a way to bring their instance back and ended up just restoring from a snapshot.
After reviewing several articles, these two were the most helpful.
Also, I initially thought that my issue was related to the fact that I had attempted to change the available storage and it had failed (ESXi rolled the change back with an error). I now think that the issue was simply the default 6GB of space.
After reading here, and talking to others, these are the steps I followed to resolve the issue:
Using SSH in to ESXI I downloaded the disk.VMDK and the disk-flat.VMDK files.
I created a new VM using Mark’s guide above - but in place of the downloaded OVA/VMDK I used the ones I downloaded in step 1.
All other steps in the configuration are the same as Mark’s guide above, but you do not need to modify the VMDK files as they were already working.
MOST Important - DO NOT TURN ON THIS VM
Adjust the drive size to something > 6GB. I ran mine up to 50GB for now.
EXPORT (but DO NOT TURN ON) the new VM to your own OVA from EXSi.
Import the OVA as a new VM and power on, HASSOS appears to have partitioned the space properly on the new machine.
Basically a long and round about way to clone the VM and adjust the size. There might have been a shorter way, but this worked for me.
