Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

Can I rebuild Esxi on a new SD card?

I am running ESXi 6.0 on an SD card on a Dell server for testing but it appears there are issues with the SD card. After a series of power failures:

ESXi reboots but new settings are not saved after reboot(eg: cannot change root password, list of VM’s can be changed but is not saved)
bootbank is not found
Looking around the net suggests the settings are not saved as any changes are probably saved to a tmp file

Are there commands to rebuild ESXi on the same or new SD card?

Can you relocate/rebuild ESXI to a more durable storage medium like a USB drive?