Unable to create VMFS partition

Well, ran into an issue where we couldn't create a datastore on our freshly set up array. A lot of people said the solution was to install windows and format the disks with NTFS. While that might work, I didn't want to do that.

You have a couple of other options

You can use a Windows Vista/7/2008/2008r2 install disk and after you click the first install button, press Shift+F10 to get a command prompt. You can then use DiskPart.

Or, if you would rather do this in the ESX shell try zeroing out the first 512k of your disks.

First you need to get the disk:

cd /
cd dev
cd cciss
ls -1

I put the -1 on the end because it makes it easier to spot the drives that don't have partitions you will now see a list of devices, things like c0d0 c0d0p1 c0d0p2... ignore the ones that have a p on it. For example, if you see a c0d0p1 ignore all of the c0d0's especially the c0d0. Here's what ours looks like

c0d0
c0d0p1
c0d0p2
c0d0p3
c0d0p5
c0d1
c0d1p1
c0d2
c0d3
c0d4
c0d5
c0d6

2-6 are my broken drives, I can't create a VMFS datastore on them. So, I did this

dd if=/dev/zero count=1024 of=<drive name>

Where the <drive name> is the drive, like c0d2 or c0d3 I did this for all of the ones that didn't have partitions and poof, i can create my datastores and extents without a problem now.