Lenovo SR650 Corrupt GPT & ESXi install failure

Recently one of our Lenovo SR650’s disk got faulty. It had 14 x 1.2 TB 10k SAS disks. As a long term solution & to avoid any urgency, we decided to remove 2 disks (faulty one for replacement & one for cold spare backup to be used by same or other similar servers).

Once we re-created new Raid.-10 & rebooted the server , boot screen was showing below error

We tried to follow the Lenovo Note which instructed to go into Setup->System Settings->Recovery->Disk GPT Recovery and set to “Automatic.” but still the error didn’t sorted. To settle it on Server Bios level, we performed following steps

• Update SR650 UEFI Firmware ( Lenovo Download Link )
• Removed Raid Config, Re-create Raid Config with Full Initialization
• Full power cycle the server once above is done.

This sorted the Bios screen error regarding GPT.

But once we started the Vmware ESXI 6.5.x installation , it was failing (between 5% and 8%) with the following error …

“partedUtil failed with message: Error: The primary GPT table states that the backup GPT is located beyond the end of disk. This may happen if the disk has shrunk or partition table is corrupted. … Error: Can’t have a partition outside the disk!  BLAH BLAH BLAH …”

Solution # 1

Boot with any windows ISO ( Must have the RAID controller driver or the OS should have in-built drivers, in my case, windows server 2019 had the raid drivers). You can also use Linux base Boot OS .

Re-create the partition , Format & Booom. Afterwards just boot from ESXI ISO/CD/USB/Networkboot , and the ESXI will install fine.

Solution # 2 (Quick & Recommended for admins)

During ESXi installer at anywhere ,

Press Alt-F1 (which will bring you to shell window asking for credentials)

Use following credentials

• ID: root
• Password: No password. Just press enter & you can use the CMD’s to sort the issue

Issue the below CMD which will show you list of disk device names that can be managed by partedUtil

** Note the disk ‘identifier’ that we want to fix. In my case it was 6.5 TB partition in which we wanted to install the esxi.

Now issue the below cmd

This overwrited the brooked partition table. Now return to the installer screen and continue.

This time, esxi installation went fine without errors.