Disk appearing as VMFS format File System

PitRejection2359 · March 13, 2022

Hi Everyone,

I'm mid-migration from ESXi to Unriad, and have come across a slight issue in that a couple of disks are appearing in VMFS FS format, and I can't access them in Unassigned Devices to copy the data off to my new unraid array.

When the PC was on ESXi, I had an LSI2008 controller (in IT mode) passed through to a windows 10 VM which had the disks attached to it, and therefore passed through to the VM to see all the SMART data, etc. They were formatted in NTFS and all working fine. Now that I'm running unraid, out of the 3 disks that were passed through in ESXi, one is showing as NFS and the other 2 are showing as VMFS. This is odd, as all 3 were passed through on the same controlled, and all appeared fine in the windows VM. It's possible that they were previously formatted as VMFS before they were passed through, but once passed through they were reformatted in windows as ntfs.

Any ideas how 2 out of the 3 are showing as VMFS, and more importantly, is there any way to mark them back to ntfs so that I can mount them as unassigned devices and copy the data across to the array?

In the attached image, the drive circled in green highlighter is OK and showing as NTFS, whereas the 2 circled in pink highlighter are showing as VMFS for some reason. EDIT: Dev 3 / sdd is correctly showing as VMFS - this disk was also in ESXI, but not passed through to anything and does have a VMFS formatted store on it.

I'm just about to hang them into an external USB HDD reader on a Windows desktop to see what they appear as, and will update when I can.