vSAN1

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  • 1.  Legacy MBR Partition unable to be erased

    Posted Oct 10, 2019 02:03 PM

    One of my disks that is to be part of my vSAN shows a Legacy MBR partition that I am unable to delete whether through the GUI or CLI. Essentially a 4 GB partition is locking up the entire drive from being useful.

    Has anyone run into this? aside from reformatting that specific drive (which may be a bad idea) what can I do?



  • 2.  RE: Legacy MBR Partition unable to be erased

    Posted Oct 10, 2019 02:14 PM

    Hello Taylor1234,

    Welcome to Communities. Are you positive it is not an ESXi installation partition? These are system-protected from deletion for obvious reasons.

    It could be something else that is in use that would prevent it from being removed e.g. a dump partition, logging/scratch location.

    You mentioned that you don't want to reformat the entire drive - is their a reason you don't want to do this? e.g. if there is nothing you need on it.

    Bob



  • 3.  RE: Legacy MBR Partition unable to be erased

    Posted Oct 10, 2019 02:20 PM

    I'm not sure if it is an ESXi installation partition or not. ESXi should be completely installed on the internal SD cards of the server.

    I have thought about the scratch location, however, I'm not quite sure how to figure out which disk the scratch location/volume is located on.



  • 4.  RE: Legacy MBR Partition unable to be erased

    Posted Oct 10, 2019 02:24 PM

    Pretty easy to test. Shutdown the host, disconnect the drive in question, and boot back up. Does it boot? If so, you can boot into something like dban or gparted to wipe that recalcitrant disk there.



  • 5.  RE: Legacy MBR Partition unable to be erased

    Posted Oct 10, 2019 03:11 PM

    Actually, I don't think it even needs to be the active installation but any installation at all (whether that was successful or not even) as it is just seeing the type and denies.

    You can get more detailed information about partition types using partedUtil and looking at the GUIDs referenced at the bottom of this kb:

    https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1036609

    You can look at configured scratch and global log directory here:

    Host > Configure > System > Advanced System Settings > Search for 'scratch'

    Bob



  • 6.  RE: Legacy MBR Partition unable to be erased

    Posted Oct 10, 2019 09:34 PM

    There were originally two partitions and I was able to delete one. The one I deleted turned out to be the coredumps which I moved to another clean disk. I was hoping to put both the coredumps and a VMFS6 datastore on that same disk but each time I create the partition It deletes the other one. Another Identical server (physically) has multiple partitions including the coredump and a datastore on the analogous disk.

    The one I have asked about on this thread I suspect to be the scratch disk location, however, I cannot say with a certainty that it is the scratch disk since I'm kinda clueless about what the volume location tells me. I can pull the drive tomorrow and reboot to see what happens.



  • 7.  RE: Legacy MBR Partition unable to be erased

    Posted Mar 09, 2024 03:49 PM

    I know that this is old post, but still can be usefull.

    https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85685

    I am pretty sure, that problem is fresh install with unpartitioned space. ESXi create without asking this partition for scratch and maybe osdata. I see 2 options: 1. install without drives 2. install with drives with VMFS partitions on it.

    Option 1 not tested.

    Option 2 works, and scratch and osdata is placed into existing datastore. ESXi

    In my exact case I removed whole raid after istalation (locked by this partition), during reboot ESXi create automatically nessesary folders on second existing datastore, and after I can recreate my raid and make datastore on it. :(.