I'm not sure if ESXi would see a USB drive or not, but even if it did, it isn't going to be able to write to an NTFS partition. FAT32 would work, but would only support drives of a limited size, and the file size would be limited to 2gb, so you'd have to convert your vmdk files to the form where a vmdk is a collection of files under 2gb (I don't recall what ESX calls that).
Alternately, you could format the USB drive as EXT2. There are some windows drivers available that let you mount EXT2 drives. From: James Rankin [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 2:42 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: ESXi fun As some of you may have noticed, I'm currently engaged in a battle with a half-dead ESXi box....I'm on the verge of restoring from backup, but one last try.... Does anyone know if there is any way to copy the virtual machine files from the ESXi "tech support mode" console onto, say, a USB drive, or somewhere else I might be able to load them onto a fresh ESXi install (this is because I'm betting ESXi doesn't support USB removable drives, although I am happy to be proved wrong)? The server isn't getting onto the network and there's no shared storage so it would have to be a "local" solution of some kind. I'm at a new job so as I'm such a quiet guy I am not usually keen to ask too many questions of as-yet-unfamiliar co-workers, so I'm leaning on the old faithful mailing list pretty heavy here :-) If no joy, I'll be pulling out the first backup tape I've ever touched in a long, long time.... TIA, JRR -- "On two occasions...I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
