All
I've been running VMWare vSphere ESXi 4.1 on a HP Proliant Microserver for a number of years. It hosts a number of stable VMs that have also been running for a number of years, including freenas.
Long and short of it is vSphere will not boot after years of trouble free operations. The server was not powered down, I just lost all connections ( from various HTPCs, mapped Windows drives etc ) one morning. Fired up vSphere client to see what I could find, and it wouldn't connect. Stuck a monitor cable into the back to be greeted by a black screen with a single blinking cursor in the top corner. Removed power, powered back up and the server POSTs fine but after posting stops at the black screen with blinking cursor.
vSphere is installed on a 250gb hard drive that came with the server, and there are 3 other hard drives installed ( 2 x 2GB and 1 x 1GB ).
I've run the HP diagnostics utilities to check all components and got a 100% pass on all components. I've run SpinRite over all the disks, and it didn't report any problems on any of them.
So, with no hardware problems, that points me at a corrupt VMWare install. I would appreciate any pointers on how to recover from this point. If there is any other useful information I can provide, let me know.
Thanks in advance.