The hard drives are not detected anymore on my ESXi 4.1 host, hence its datastores went missing after booting on a custom oem.tgz.
This happened subsequently to installing an additional driver for the RTL8169 NIC.
I placed the relevant oem.tgz into /bootbank (carefully backing up the previous oem.tgz), the booting process went through although it took longer than it used to before using the new driver. So the network card was indeed assigned a vmnic, however... both /bootbank and /altbookbank went awol (they're just completely missing) and my two datastores are missing.
Note that all networking features are working fine, I can access the host via the management network, connect with vSphere client, SSH it... etc.
Note that I have to reenable SSH after each reboot, which I never had to do. This is yet again another change that I noticed since booting on this new oem.tgz file. So the inetd.conf doesn't seem to be permanently taking the changes I do to it when I enable SSH.
What steps would you suggest me to take now in order to get back this ESXi host to work again ?
Any troubleshooting guidelines from here would be greatly appreciated as I am very worried about the current interruption.
Can I resinstall without loosing my VMs ? Maybe this could be a chance to upgrade to ESXi 5, would that be possible ?
P.S.
In the worst case scenario where I couldn't get ESXi back to normal quickly, is there a way to recoup the VM files in order to load them up, at least temporarily, within a VMware Workstation (we have only one ESXi server) ?
Could this recouping be done via a Linux live CD my mounting the relevant partitions ?
