After a disk failure on a VMWare GSX I was able to start the raid with one disk and copy the VMWare image to my ESXi server. After repairing the image with
vmkfstools -x repair /vmfs/volumes/source/vmname/vmname.vmdk
and converting it to ESXi with
vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/source/vmname/vmname.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/dest/vmname/vmname.vmdk -d thin
I am not able to boot the image an just get
GRUB Loading stage1.5.
GRUB loading, please wait...
_
and the cursor does not even blink.
What are my options now? Is it possible to recover somehow with a rescue CD? What are the steps?
UPDATE:
I followed the advice to create a new Ubuntu server and add the VMWare image as new disk. However I get the following.
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
I was trying to restore the superblock but had no luck with the following commands.
sudo mke2fs -n /dev/sdb
The above printed several numbers (as described in http://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/repair-a-broken-ext4-superblock-in-ubuntu/).
e2fsck -b 20480000 /dev/sdb
I just keep getting "The superblock could not be read...". Do I have any chance to get the data on this ext3 file system back?
Install Ubuntu as a fresh VM, then mount the vmdk from the failed system as an additional disk.