Virtual drive on eSATA drive won't mount

I originally posted this question in the VMWare Communities area on May 24, 2009

"I have a Dell 2650 ESX 3.5 server running with a 1TB eSATA drive as a storage unit for dumping off daily differential backups. The eSATA card is a Sil3114 chipset.

All was working well until one of my VMs running Backup Exec 12.5 was doing a backup job of a regular 2003 Server running on a Dell 2850 box. Its been running fine for a while. In this case the VM got hung up and I eventually had to shut it down and reboot the VMWare server.

All the other VMs came up fine except for this one. Once I edited the properties and removed the eSATA virtual drive, the VM boots up fine. The error I get is that it can't mount the virtual drive image because of an "invalid argument".

Is there a tool I can run that can test and correct errors that might be causing the problem?

Thanks