I just had an instance were all my storage was unavailable to my ESXi host for a short time - all machines recovered happily when the paths were restored and marched on with the exception of one: The VCSA appliance. On booting, I'm greeted with 'Failed to start File System Check on '/dev/.....' and I'm stuck in 'Emergency Mode'. My searching seems to have info on VCSA6 and possibly before, but VCSA 6.5 is a different animal - I don't seem to be able to interrupt the boot to modify the GRUB loader and boot with bash or anything, and if I run 'systemctl status systemd-fsck-root.service', I get 'fsck failed with error code 4' and 'Failed to start File System Check on /dev/disk/...'. I can't run fsck or e2fsck in this state... Basically, the 'Emergency Mode' seems to be about as useless as an ice salesman at the south pole.
Does anyone know how I can get my VCSA up and running again?
The fact that the VCSA is this fragile is rather poor... I have several Linux based VMs running in my setup, and of them, this is the only one that blew up as a result - the rest, at most, needed a reboot to clear up. Windows? Didn't skip a beat. Every Windows machine picked up right where it left off.