How to recover Vmware ESXi from corrupted thumb drive

One of our ESXi hosts recently didn’t survive a reboot – the thumb drive got corrupted. Of course, we didn’t have a working backup. The thumb drive couldn’t be copied because some files weren’t readable. The idea was to do a fresh ESXi install and then just copy the old configuration. However, it wasn’t clear where that configuration was stored. After some research, I found a file state.tgz, which stores the configuration. I was able to copy that file successfully, replace the original file in fresh install and everything worked!