Esxi Installer Fatal Error 33
*As always, I am presenting a way that I fixed my issue with this specific error. Proceed as your own risk as your environment may be different from mine!
From time to time I mix it up a bit and go off topic from Cisco. Today is that day. If you have been following me on Twitter (@TheRoutingTable) then you know I had an issue with a VMHost of mine. The error that I was getting was “Error loading /k.b00 Fatal error: 33 (Inconsistent data)”. I came across a bunch of ways to possibly resolve this issue and wanted to share the way that I used.
Background
Esxiのハード要件を全て満たすハード上でCD起動する; ESXiをインストールする. Boot MenuでESXi Installerを選択する; インストールを進めるかどうか聞かれる(Enter) ライセンス許諾を聞かれる(F11でおk) インストール先を選ぶ(入れたい場所を選ぶ。. A corrupt ESXi 5.x installation file supplied by a vendor A vendor-provided USB drive or CD/DVD media that is faulty The boot device, such as a USB Flash Drive. Vmware Esxi Fatal Error 33. Error Loading /k.b00 Fatal Error 33 (inconsistent Data). Stick and the scripted installation is using VMware Workstation. I am facing an issue, seems to be a rare one.
For reference, I boot VMWare ESXi off of a usb flash drive for each of my hosts. I chose to use a cheap, bargain-bin flash drive because it’s what I had around when I built this host. Which brings me to my most important recommendation:
How to fix an ESXi 6.0 fix corrupted host imageprofile. Note: Even we have already copied the Profile and VIBs files from the working ESXi (tasks explained in the previous articles and above), we can also do the next step to copy that files into the corrupted ESXi host using the imgdb.tgz file. Oct 20, 2017 I didn’t follow the steps as I moved on to new hardware that required ESXi 6.5 update 1. In retrospect, I probably should have fixed ESXi 5.5 as the ESXi 6.5 Web vSphere UI – apart of having far less features than the classic Windows vSphere Client UI )is ridden with bugs. More on those bugs later.
ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR VM HOST CONFIG!
Ok, good. Got that out of my system. Of course, as I’m sure you guessed, I didn’t have a backup. Luckily there is a reasonably quick fix.
Install Esxi 6.5
The Fix: Error loading /k.b00 Fatal error: 33 (Inconsistent data)
After searching the web I found people talking about modifying the image on the flash drive to replace corrupted files such as the one mentioned in the error (Error loading /k.b00) and other fixes that required a good bit of work. In my case, this was a single, standalone host in a home environment. I created a new usb flash drive with VMWare ESXi on it. Important note is to make sure you use the same version you had before you received the error.
I booted to the new drive on my host and it was treating things like a new install. Go ahead and configure things like a new VM Host while choosing this new flash drive as your install media. That way your partition with your datastore is unaffected. ***That is key!*** Make sure not to overwrite your datastore partition if stored locally!
Once you are booted up and you connect to your VM Host, you will need to recreate your vSwitch settings such as vlans, etc. Other global settings will need to be reconfigured as well. Then, it’s not too bad to get back to working. You choose the option to “Register a VM”, instead of creating a new one. Then browse the old vmfs that your datastore was on and find your directory for each virtual machine. You can choose each VM accordingly and register them with your new VMWare ESXi install. Then, you want to verify settings such as network and then you should be able to power them up as normal.
Summary
Error Sans
Yes, I did end up reinstalling the VM host from scratch on a new usb drive, but it seemed much quicker than the process to repair the usb drive that was corrupted. Especially in a home environment, this may be a more suitable option, but may also help in certain business settings as well. Weighing the options, this just seemed to be the best option for my situation.
Esxi Install Fatal Error 33
Hope this can help someone else!