Reinstalling esxi to an adjacent drive?

Question

VMware

There is an esxi server with 2 disks, the hypervisor itself is installed on the 1st disk and a datastore is created, the 2nd disk is just a datastore.
The 1st disk died, the installer does not see it, the disk is also not visible in other operating systems, however, the 2nd disk, which is correctly visible under the datastore, and there are no issues with it.
The question is, is it possible to reinstall the system on the 2nd disk without deleting the datastore itself?

Answer 1

As far as I understand, no, that's not possible. There specific partitioning, ie. you have to edit the partition table. Therefore, the previous speaker is right - put ESXi on a flash drive and stick a partition with virtual machines into it. Virtual machines will have to be added to the inventory again by handles.

Answer 2

Why don't you want to put it on a flash drive?