Cannot Create ramdisk error during Upgrade (Scratchconfig isnt working?)

Question

I am trying to use Update Manager to upgrade ESXi 5.1 to ESXi5.5. I am getting the error "Cannot create a ramdisk of the size 333mb to store the upgrade image."
The ESXi has plenty of disk/ram left.
I have researched and found an issue where the scratchconfig was pointing at a non-existent device. I set the scratchconfig and rebooted.
After the reboot in the new folder I did see the various var,core,logs etc folders, however  I still get this Cannot create ramdisk error when trying to upgrade.
I tried from various articles /vmfs/volumes/datastore uuid/.locker-host and /vmfs/volumes/datastore uuid/scratch, both with the same result.
I confirmed I can write in these new folders.
Everytime the log still says  ERROR', test 'SPACE_AVAIL_ISO', expected '349773754', found '0' despite the scracthconfig.
What I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

It turns out another group had created another administrator account and removed administrator access from the root account.
/etc/vmware/hostd/authorization.xml shows that the root user has lost the 'Administrator' role:
<ACEData id="10">
<ACEDataEntity>ha-folder-root</ACEDataEntity>
<ACEDataId>10</ACEDataId>
<ACEDataIsGroup>false</ACEDataIsGroup>
<ACEDataPropagate>true</ACEDataPropagate>
<ACEDataRoleId>-5</ACEDataRoleId>
<ACEDataUser>root</ACEDataUser>
  </ACEData>
  When ACEDataRoleId is set to '-1' this indicates Administrator. In your case, the Role has been set to -5 which is not a defined role and likely hardened to do nothing.