I figured out a way to see both my USB sticks in the ESXi busybox shell. If you read my previous post you will know that the system enables passthrough of the non-boot USB devices for use by guests by default.

Whether or not there is a “right” way to do this I don’t know (vmware kb or google don’t turn up much of use).

So, going back to that mine of information, the messages file, I notice that /sbin/chkconfig is run immediately before it states that usb passthrough is enabled. Running /sbin/chkconfig –list shows:

~ # /sbin/chkconfig --list
DCUI on
TSM-SSH on
TSM on
usbarbitrator on
lbtd on
storageRM on
sensord on
vprobed on
vobd on
wsman on
slpd on
sfcbd-watchdog on
sfcbd off
ntpd on
hostd on
iked off
lwiod off
netlogond off
lsassd off
~ #

So as a guess I changed usbarbitrator to off with the following command:

~ # /sbin/chkconfig usbarbitrator off

Rebooting the system and looking again, I can now see both the devices: mpx.vmhba33 (the boot USB) and mpx.vmhba32 (my target datastore). The later appears as a FAT partition, despite my trying to dd my vmfs3 filesystem over the top of it.

I will try more dd experiments at the next free slot.

At least I made some progress!