Having a bad evening

You know how sometimes things just won’t work. Well I’m having one of those evenings. The problem at hand for the last few days was to create a datastore on a USB stick on my ESXi 4.0.0 system, booted from a USB stick.

Well I couldn’t get it to work and by the looks of things neither has anyone else, although it apparently worked in 3.5. (Problem 1)

I want to create a datastore on a USB not only because it would be very useful but also to migrate my existing VMs onto it so I could delete my disk based datastore and re-partition my drive in order to install more physical O/Ss than just Ubuntu.

Anyway, since I couldn’t create any other datastore I just deleted my VMs and thought it would be quick to re-create them. So try to delete the datastore I created. Can’t do it: ‘Unable to remove datastore xxxxxxx the resource is in use’ (Problem 2).

Lots of people had that problem but none seem to match my scenario.

OK, just boot into Ubuntu and re-partition the drive. Unfortunately I get errors trying to delete the partition and it ends up in a right mess. (Problem 3). The only way to get out of this looks like reformatting the hard drive and re-installing Ubuntu.

So I take my USB drive which I wiped to try and make a datastore. Now I can’t format it (Problem 4).

See what I mean?

Now I’ve blown 1hr 40mins time budget on problems but I finally just managed to re-format the USB key and use Unetbootin to put Ubuntu back on. Hurrah! I can boot my machine with it.

But wait! I can’t now even format the hard drive in my machine when booted from the USB Ubuntu: “An error occurred while performing an operation on “1TB Hard Disk” (ATA Hitachi…): The operation failed. It thinks it is in use.

I’m going to bed.