When your luns have lost their partition and you cannot add them in VMware

Issue: When you try to add your lun with vmware data in it it asks you to reformat it.

Unable to read partition information from this disk

The hard disk is blank.

Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to update disk partition information.

Solution: Recreate the partition

1. Try to add that particular lun which you are not able to add and make a note of the naa.xxxx number that you see for the lun.

2. run

Esxcfg-scsidevs -l in the command line which will list all the devices with their naa.xxxx

 compare the naa.xxx id that you copied earlier from the vcenter server to the list that you see here and make a note of the /vmfs/devices/disks/DeviceName for that particular naa.xxxx id and run the command

fdisk -l "/vmfs/devices/disks/DeviceName"

The output appears similar to:

Disk /vmfs/devices/disks/DeviceName: 536 MB, 536870912 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 65 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

                        Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/vmfs/devices/disks/DeviceName             1        66    524287+  ee  EFI GPT

The rest of it is in the below links from VMware.

Refer : http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008886

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1014953