GRUB loading, please wait... Error 17

[jlpeifer]

Howdy,

We experienced a lengthy power outage during off-hours.  When the UPS drained completely our ESXi 5.5 server shut down ungracefully.  Upon trying to start the server again I'm greeted with the following screen...

GRUB Loading stage1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait...

Error 17

I was able to get the server running again by installing VMware ESXi 5.5 onto a USB flash drive, booting from that drive, finding the virtual machine's VMX file in the server's datastore and adding it to the temporary installation's list of virtual machines.

I'd like to resolve this GRUB issue but I have no (zero, nadda, zilch) idea how to fix this problem.

Can anyone provide guidance?

[JarryG]

IIRC "error 17" has something to do with incorrect/damaged/unknown partition. Try to boot some live-cd, check your disk with fdisk (find your root-partition) and if necessary, fix grub configuration...

[Davoud Teimouri]

Hi,

This link is for older version of ESX, but may be can help you on this regard.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007908

BR

[jlpeifer]

So I was able to get around this issue temporarily by loading ESXi onto a flash-drive, booting from that flash-drive, finding the my VM's vmx file in the server's datastore, adding it to inventory then booting it.  That Band-Aide got me through the most difficult moment of this crash, BUT...

I still have this problem.  Apparently things have changed in ESXi 5.5 because fdisk doesn't work.  When I try to use fdisk I'm instructed to use GNU parted instead.  And that's when I get completely lost.  I've Googled everything I can think of and I can't come up with an answer on how to resolve this.

Anyone, please?

[Sergavens]

Check drive priority in BIOS.  In my case it has changed somehow.  With liveCD I found a drive with many ESX partitions and set it first in bios.