I accidentally did a passthru of my boot device to a vm. This is a real gotcha because then the Host cannot modify the config.
Disclaimer – this could completely hose your system, proceed ONLY if you know what you are doing (or have nothing to lose).
So I had to do a little digging and found the following very helpful articles for ESXi 4:
http://vm-help.com/esx40i/VMDirectPath/fix_config_issues.php
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/328834
However there are a couple of additional notes that I need to add because things were a little different.
I found & mounted the following partitions in my client vm (CentOS):
/dev/sdc1 – this was /boot
/dev/sdc5 – this might be the baseline config directory, not 100% sure
/dev/sdc6 – this was the config directory
/dev/sdc8 – this was /var/db stuff
local.tgz is actually inside state.tgz
So here is what I did to recover
mount /dev/sdc6 /mnt/c6 mkdir ~/working cd ~/working tar xvzf /mnt/c6/state.tgz tar xvzf local.tgz cd etc/vmware grep passthru esx.conf vi esx.conf - from: /device/000:000:26.0/owner = "passthru" - to: /device/000:000:26.0/owner = "vmkernel" cd ../.. tar cvzf local.tgz etc tar /mnt/c6/state.tgz local.tgz
After that I shutdown the VM & rebooted.
The system came back up, I had a little clean up & documentation to do, but it was recovered.