topic Re: No mbrscan in ESX Host Utilities 5.2? in VMware Solutions Discussions

No mbrscan in ESX Host Utilities 5.2?

sequeirad — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:05:22 GMT

errr..am I missing something?

I can't find the mbrscan utility in EHU 5.2....

I need it to find out what vmdk need to be re-aligned.

Or is there another way to do it in 5.2?

Re: No mbrscan in ESX Host Utilities 5.2?

aronk — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 19:15:46 GMT

mbrscan is available for esx4.x as part of the Virtual Storage Console. You can run fdisk on the vmdk or log into the VM and verify. For Linux, of the vmdk directly, use fdisk, go into extended mode "x" then "p" to view the partition table. if the first sector starts at 63 instead of 64, then it needs to be aligned. for windows, use msinfo32. Expand Components/Storage/Disks, and look at "Partition Starting Offset". If the offset is 32,256 instead of 32,768, then it needs to be aligned.. Windows 7, and server 2008 are already aligned..

Re: No mbrscan in ESX Host Utilities 5.2?

dandillharsch — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 19:17:03 GMT

There were issues with it in 5.2 so they might have removed it. I'm pretty sure you can download it from netapp separately though. I believe you can get it also from the VSC 2.0 if you have that loaded though not sure if the version included in that had the bug or not.

Re: No mbrscan in ESX Host Utilities 5.2?

sequeirad — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:31:38 GMT

Someone on another forum confirmed that you can extract the mbrscan and mbralign from the 5.1 version and copy them to the /opt/netapp/santools folder on each esx host and that should be enough.