I have a virtual machine guest running Redhat Linux 4.4 on a ESX server(version 3.01). It called babel2. Babel2 was assigned a 1 disk with 3 partitions. The sda1 is boot, sda2 is VG00 and sda3 is appsvg. One day, we discovered that we could not write to any filesystems in VG00. This is using lvm2. When use vgdisplay, the error said: "Locking type 1 initialization failed." LVM also complained about could not find a disk. When tried to touch a file in tmp, error says" read only filesystem". When reboot, the system was not bootable.

So we created another VM which has two disks this time. The sda has two partitions, sda1 is boot and sda2 is vg00. The sdb has one partition, sda1 is used by appsvg.

We replaced old babel2 by the new one. It was perfect for two days, suddenly, the same issue came back. We do not know what triggle this event.

Contacted VMware, VMware told me that is a known problem for VMware 3.x and Redhat 4.3 and 4.4. They recommended to install a driver:
mptscsi-rhel4gos-3.02.62.01-0vmw.i386.rpm

I would like to know if anyone has the same issue like this and if the fix will fix the problem.

Thanks,

Ting