vCenter appliance boot to emergency mode due to a corrupted file system

After I had to restart vCenter for some reason, this server failed to boot properly and went into the Emergency Mode. The appliance fails to start and reports the following message:

To find out the root cause of this error, open the vCenter Console and scroll up (Shift + Page Up) the screen to see the first error. As you can see, one of the partitions “/dev/core_vg/core” is corrupted and it’s filesystem needs to be checked.

First, check that none of your filesystems are full, enter the root password and type shell to access the bash shell and then type “df –h” command to show filesystems usage. As you can see, none of the filesystems are full.

So let’s run a filesystem check on /dev/core_vg/core. You can answer all questions manually or use the “-y” option to automatically fix all issues. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of this stage.

e2fsck  /dev/core_vg/core

When the filesystem has been fixed, reboot vCenter.

reboot -f

Now you should be able to boot the vCenter Service Appliance properly.

Added 09/07/2023

For those who are not reading all the comments, if you, like some people, are unable to scroll through the console port or experiencing difficulty in identifying the root cause of the problem like some guys, I recommend redirecting boot errors to a virtual serial port file as a solution.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2009269

11 Comments

  1. I’ve spent the better part of 2 days searching for answers to this with all sorts of articles read and this was the answer. FINALLY. Thank you!

  2. Hello,
    I have the problem that Scroll Up (Shift + Page Up) does not work in the VCenter Console (VC 7.0) and therefore I can not see the cause of the problem. I tried several browsers and remote consoles, Scroll Up (Shift + Page Up) does not work. Is the start log stored in a file? If so, where do I find that?
    Kind regards
    Walter

  3. Thank you! This helped me today too.. for me, it was /dev/log_vg_log.

    The idea about screen recording was fantastic! Very helpful.

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