I have a whitebox pc with VMware ESXi 6.0 for testing.
If I recall properly, the whitebox started with the following:
ESXi 5.1
ESXi 5.5
ESXi 6.0
I removed the single non-raid drive from the PC and plugged into a windows 7 laptop to check the drive SMART status and when I plugged the drive back into the ESXi PC, it booted up with ESXi 5.1.
In ESXi, I did SHIFT R and I had the following:
BANK6: not a VMware boot bank
Installed hypervisors: 5.1
No alternate hypervisor to roll back to.
Did the windows 7 laptop change the ESXi GPT partition entry? How can I fix this? Do I need to reinstall ESXi 6.0?
Looks like someone else had this problem as well:
bank6 not a vmware boot bank no hypervisor found
"First, In order to "remove drive letter", Windows goes rude to change the partition entry in GPT(so harddisk LBA1, LBA2, ... all gets changed), with the highest bit in Attribute flags changed from 00 to 80 (the 0637h byte for example). This "change partition table" behavior does not exist in the era of MBR partition table.
Second, I see that ESXi 5.0 leaves an empty partition entry slot(for untold reason) , and Windows shifts the entries behind to fill the gap after GPT modification. So ESXi's boot bank BANK6 gets screwed. I think a VMware so-called BANK is a synonym for a partition entry."
Thanks
