I am referring your article on sanburrow.com on how to recover VMFS3 with LINUX Live CD.
VMFS: Unable to read volume information
I am using USB version of Ubuntu 12.04 as LIVECB and have two hard drives, one which need data recovery and is VMFS 5 formatted disk but it is strange other device is also showing above issue where it is VMFS 3 formatted disk but on 5.1 U1 ESXi server. I have tried everything but this error is kind of dead block for me.
VMFS VolInfo: invalid magic number 0x00000000
VMFS: Unable to read volume information
I have tried that in many different way. For little background, I have ESXi 5.1 Update 1 on whitebox and because hardware is not supported, its been recommended to downgrade to 4.1 because of frequent purple screen issue.
I am not ESXi or linux expert but using this box to use virtual application development envrionment instead of installing everything on one box.
NOTE: I have deleted hard drive from my ESXi 5.1 server after removing all VMs from inventory. I hope this should not be any issue and well does not strike much as none of these hard drives are able to mount.
Any help will be much appreciated and as I have lot of VMs which are one year old.