Step 1: Identify the device. fdisk -l showed /dev/sde as 12 TB, with partition 1 (VMFS) starting at sector 2048. Good—partition still there.
Maya grabbed coffee and her battle-tested Linux VM with vmfs-tools compiled. First rule of VMFS recovery: do not write anything to the affected LUN . She used a rescue Linux live CD on a physical host with HBA access. recover vmfs datastore
Success: Found backup VMFS6 superblock at 0x20000000 . Step 1: Identify the device
The command returned: Superblock updated. Checking file system... recover vmfs datastore