Updating the VMWare ESXi Disk Dump File

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Updating the VMWare ESXi Disk Dump File
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Tue, 08/19/2008 - 11:47 — Cameron
So in my previous blog I said I used iSCSI to mount the VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd disk dump included in the VMWare ESXi install...I recieved a few comments about this as it is a heavy handed way of getting the support you need, so I figured out a non-iscsi way of mounting the VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd file.
If you haven't read my other blog the VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd file is on the VMWare installer media inside the install.tgz file as VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd.bz2. This file is a bziped disk dump of a complete hard drive...it has 6 partitions defined inside of it. The first thing you need to do is determine the offset to the parttition you wish to mount..in our case that is most likely partition 5 as it contains the oem.tgz file:

Untar-gz install.tgz (mkdir /tmp/esx-temp; tar -xzvf install.tgz -C /tmp/esx-temp)

Unbzip2 the disk image (cd /tmp/esx-temp/usr/lib/vmware/installer;bunzip2 VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd.bz2)

Determine the sector size (fdisk -ul VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd)
This should print out the following:

[root@cbrunner-f8 installer]# fdisk -ul VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.
Disk VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd: 0 MB, 0 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd1            8192     1535999      763904    5  Extended
VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd4   *          32        8191        4080    4  FAT16

As you can see the sector size is 512 bytes...so now you can mount any of the partions by passing the "offset" option to mount with a value equal to the start block * 512. Here are the steps...

Make a temp mout directory (mkdir /tmp/esx-5)

Mount the partition 5 through the loopback device (mount -o loop,offset=$((512*8224)) VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd /tmp/esx-5/ )
The $((512*8224)) automatically does the multiplication for you...isn't that nice. (Note 8224 is the start block for partition 5). At this point if you do a "ls /tmp/esx-5" you get:

[root@cbrunner-f8 installer]# ls /tmp/esx-5/
binmod.tgz  boot.cfg  cim.tgz  environ.tgz  license.tgz  oem.tgz  vmkernel.gz

You can now update the oem.tgz file. When you are done you need to "umount /tmp/esx-5 ", bzip the disk image "bzip2 VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd", and then rebuild install.tgz (cd /tmp/esx-temp/; tar czvf ../install.tgz sbin/ usr/).
-Cameron


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