vmfs2recover -d /dev/sdb -o 128 -b 1048576 --force

VMFS Recovery Guide: Restoring VMware Datastores and VMDK Files

It was a typical Monday morning for John, a system administrator at a small IT firm. He arrived at the office, sipped his coffee, and began to tackle the day's tasks. However, as he logged into his computer, he was greeted with a dreaded sight: a critical error message on the VMware ESXi host.

From that day on, John made sure to regularly back up his VMFS datastores and have a solid recovery plan in place, just in case disaster struck again.

When the FDT is lost, files become inaccessible even if data blocks remain intact.

Panicked, John tried to troubleshoot the issue, but it soon became clear that the problem was more severe than he initially thought. The ESXi host was unable to recover the VMFS datastore, and the data was in danger of being lost.

Manual removal of VMDK (virtual disk) files or the entire virtual machine from the datastore.

vmfsTool -S /dev/disks/naa.xxx