Mount an ESX partition with VMFS Requirements: You have an account at console.online.net You have a Dedibox dedicated server This tutorial will explain how to mount an ESXI partition in rescue mode, as the filesystem used by this distribution is not supported by default Once you are connected to the server in rescue mode, you need to run some commands as superuser, therefore we are switching directly to the super user to save some time: sudo su Confirm it by typing the password of the rescue mode. Now we launch an update of the packet manager and install the vmfs tools: aptitude update && aptitude install vmfs-tools After the package is installed, we have several new commands available: vmfs-fuse debugvmfs fsck.vmfs From this selection we will use vmfs-fuse, which is an utility for VMFS. We mount the partition as following: vmfs-fuse VOLUME MOUNTPOINT Esxi will mount several partitions, therefore we have to run: fdisk We will see a partition with the following label: VMware VMFS Let us take sdb3 for example. We have to mount it now, to have access to the data: vmfs-fuse /dev/sdb3 /mnt/vmfs The partition is now available at /mnt/vmfs In case you are having problems accessing it, you need to patch it: ls /mnt/vmfs -lah We can now recover our partitions. Don't forget that when you are recovering a VM with a 8GB (for example) disk, it will also take 8GB space on our local disk.