power failure: VM not booting and stuck at blank screen with "-" prompt

[jaheshkhan]

WE have 2 cisco BE6000M M4 ie cisco 220 M4 server for unified communication server (CUCM,CUC,IMP servers).

Power failure happened in the datacenter. both server went down.  after powering ON we found three VMs didnt boot up. console screen shows blank screen with "-" blank prompt. its esxi 6.5. There is no other errors or warning or log showing from ESXi 6.5 side. there is no VCenter.

What could be the reason? I tried to boot from recovery disk by setting boot order CD drive as the first order. but whenever the VM restarts boot order changed back to HDD. why this is happening?

UP and down arrow also didnt work while setting boot order. but Plus/Minus button worked. it was in internet explorer 11.5.

[a_p_]

A blinking underscore in the upper right is usually caused by a corrupted Maser Boot Record.

I can't tell you why changing the boot order dowsn't work for you, However, instead of changing the boot order, you may configure a Boot Delay of e.g. 5 seconds (5,000ms) in the VM's settings. This will allow you to press the ESC key when the VM starts, which will bring you to the Boot Selection screen.

André

[jaheshkhan]

thank you for your reply.

we did as per your suggestion i could boot from CD option. i tried with recovery disk. But after that the results are same. recovery option didnt show any kind of errors.

Can you please help how can i check its master boot error.

Still in bios, when im in boot menu, i cannot use up and down arrow for selecting the option.

[a_p_]

Please allow me two questions before we proceed:

• Which operating system is installed on these VMs?
• Do you have a current backup of these VMs?

In addition to the questions, please attach the vmware.log file of one of these VM's to a reply post. Ensure that it doesn't contains any credentials/passwords in e.g. the Annotations.

André

[jaheshkhan]

• Which operating system is installed on these VMs?

         Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 64 bit

• Do you have a current backup of these VMs?

     NO backup for this VMs. it was recently up. so backup was just going to implement.

vmware.log let me try to get it.

[jaheshkhan]

Pls check the vmware.log

[a_p_]

I cannot see any issue with the VM itself, so it's likely a guest OS/file system issue, where something might have been overwritten (Boot Sector, GRUB, ...).

I'm unfortunately not very familiar with RHEL, so someone else may need to help. I'd suggest that you alternatively/additionally ask the question in a RHEL forum.

What I recommend in any case, is to either create a VM based backup, or at least create a snapshot so that you can always revert to the current state in case thing become worse during troubleshooting/fixing the issue.

André

[ShekharRana]

Seems OS issue but still doubt then create a new .VMX file and add existing HDD (only OS Drive) of corrupted VM and check. If still get the same error then repair OS.