Hi all,
Unfortunately yesterday our esxi 5.0 was down due to a big problem on the areca 1212 raid controller (happy christmas 
).
The server was not able to access anymore to the raid 1 volume present on that controller and so all the vm present on that volume was not accessible.
Since we don't have another controller as spare parts, we decided to connect one of the two disks of the mirror arry directly to the SATA controller of the mainboard, but the esxi server is not able to browse the content datastore (I have launched several times the "rescan all" command from the vsphere client graphic interface) even if the sata controller storage device tells me that he is detecting a vmfs partition on it.
After hours of test and trials the vm are still down, we was in hurry so we decided to boot all our vm directly from a different datastore that we use as backup, but in this way we have lost some very important informations (files & folders) since the last backup was dated 15/12/2012!!
Now what is the best & easy way to access to the VMFS present on one of the mirror hard disk? I need just to copy the .vmdk file that we need and then I will mount it on my office computer using vmware workstation, but I can't find any way to browse the VMFS (version 5) filesystem....please help me!!
Thanks in advance