Disk shift – shift from actual disk beginning where first byte of Partition Table is supposed to be. If this byte is missing, disk cannot be initialized/recognized and presented as RAW. The beginning should be specified if actual beginning is shifted.

Symptoms

Partition table / file system / datastore is missing on the ESX host. That is some times an issue, when mounting StarWind virtual disks from older versions.

Resolution

Initially header of the image file was presented as the separate file. That was changed starting from version 6. Below is the header file specifications depending on the StarWind version.

• Header size for the image files from version 5 to 5.4 is 1024 B

• Starting from 5.5 (September of 2010) we used 64 KB header size

• From 5.8 we excluded the header from image files completely. Therefore, the size is 0.

So, if you encountered one of the symptoms mentioned above or you inherited some pack of unrecognized image files, then try to set any of header sizes and check partition table / file system / datastore (ESX) availability (this implies the image file already connected from StarWind console):

1. Locate this file

C:\Program Files\StarWind Software\StarWind\StarWind.cfg

2. Locate same string

<device file="My Computer\D\tmp.swdsk" readonly="No" name="imagefile1" /> and add header. Should look like this <device file="My Computer\D\tmp.swdsk" readonly="No" name="imagefile1" header="1024" />

3. Restart StarWind service and check availability of partition table / file system / datastore (ESX)

See Also

Recreating a missing VMFS datastore partition in VMware vSphere

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