I would expect that deleting a VMFS volume and reformatting it removes all references to files that existed on the volume before the format.
That assumption either is wrong ??? - or the format process works very strange.
Why would it keep references to files that - if I trust Datastorebrowser - no longer exist ?
Hey Ulli,
How was the format done? Was it right click delete the datastore and adding it back using the add datastore?
If that's the case, the data would still be there.
Essentially in all operating systems, deleting data just means that you are removing the file pointer from the inode tables or NTFS/FAT32 tables. The data still exists in the disk. Hence a low level format is usually done followed by "zeroing" out the disk.
On VMFS if you delete a "datastore" essentially what you are doing is just removing the partition table.
On a test ESX 4.x box (just to rule out a ESXi 5.x or VMFS5 issue) try creating a VM and then powering off the VM and deleting the datastore. On recreating the partition table and doing a vmkfstools -V, the datastore usually comes back.
This is what keeps deta recovery firms like ONTRACK going :-)
If you remember, the same thing could be done on almost all versions of Windows with Norton System Utilities that allowed an "undelete" or deleted file recovery feature!
Regards
a