I have an ESXi 5.5 host stuck with all my hardware in passthrough mode, so it cannot find the datastore. The ESXi OS boots up and in the ESXi GUI client from my Windows machine, I can disable passthrough, but upon reboot it all goes back to passthrough again. So I tried to edit the esx.conf file that is in the ESX host OS image using SSH, set it all to "vmkernel" instead of "passthrough" but the same thing happens: It all goes back to passthrough after reboot.
So the last resort I have is to grab the s.v00 image from the 250MB FAT partition where the ESX OS image resides, mount the image on another machine, edit the esx.conf file offline and then let it boot.
I can't find any info on opening/mounting the s.v00 image file. Any ideas?