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3 Replies Last post: Jun 28, 2009 10:47 AM by brevemike  

Help! Data lost, Data Found, Data Lost again - but directory structure intact? Vista/XP posted: Jun 28, 2009 8:29 AM

Click to view brevemike's profile Lurker 3 posts since
Jan 7, 2009

Ok, long winded description.

Sometime Friday night Fusion crashed (spinning beach ball of death) while I was running my Vista VM.
This not being too uncommon for Vista, I Force Quit and restarted Fusion and the Vista VM.
I received a "disk read error".

Quit Fusion and out to the finder where I was unable to read the disk with VMDKMounter.
So I'm not recovering my data that way.

Repair #1 - Back to Fusion and booting the Vista VM from the install disc. I run the repair. The repair "works".
I reboot the Vista VM and no error...no anything.
Repair #2 - I reboot the VM from the install disc and re-run the repair. This time I receive an error message indicating the bootloader is missing.

From the Vista repair menu I drop out to a command line to check the disc, and there are all my folders with all my data but no system files in the root directory.
No problem thinks I. I'll load the disc into my XP Pro VM as a second hard drive and retrieve my data. (No, I don't know why I didn't just use VMDKMounter now.)

Here's where I really blew it. When setting up the Vista disk I UNCHECKED the copy box. (No, I don't know why. But I suspect caffeine depravation.)

I booted the XP Pro VM and got some coffee.
When I got back to my desk, XP was running a repair on my Vista disk. "Removing invalid index..." blah, blah, blah.
When XP finished booting, there's my 100GB Vista disk mounted...with 99.8GB of FREE SPACE.

When I checked the disk all my data was gone, poof!
But the directory structure is intact!

I tried to restore the snapshot of the disc which takes me back to Repair #2. This time however, there's no data.
Back in the finder, the Vista VMDK shows about 250MB in Size, however the snapshot from that morning is showing 2.1GB.

Is there a chance that my data is still stuck inside the vmem file, and is there any way to get it out?
Here's a listing of the files in the Vista VM package.


-rw-------@   1   staff  2147483648 Jun 27 12:48 564df50f-78a2-86e0-0e3d-e76da0ff0a35.vmem
drwxrwxrwx    3   staff         102 Jun 27 12:48 564df50f-78a2-86e0-0e3d-e76da0ff0a35.vmem.lck
drwxr-xr-x  196   staff        6664 Jun 24 15:42 Applications
-rw-r--r--@   1   staff    36503552 Jun 27 12:58 Windows Vista Ultimate-000002.vmdk
drwxrwxrwx    3   staff         102 Jun 27 12:48 Windows Vista Ultimate-000002.vmdk.lck
-rw-r--r--@   1   staff  2147483648 Jun 27 08:57 Windows Vista Ultimate-Snapshot1.vmem
-rw-r--r--@   1   staff     1146986 Jun 27 08:57 Windows Vista Ultimate-Snapshot1.vmsn
-rw-r--r--@   1   staff        8684 Jun 27 12:49 Windows Vista Ultimate.nvram
-rw-------@   1   staff   250150912 Jun 27 12:56 Windows Vista Ultimate.vmdk
drwxrwxrwx    3   staff         102 Jun 27 12:48 Windows Vista Ultimate.vmdk.lck
-rw-------@   1   staff         634 Jun 27 12:43 Windows Vista Ultimate.vmsd
-rwxr-xr-x@   1   staff        4462 Jun 27 12:48 Windows Vista Ultimate.vmx
drwxrwxrwx    3   staff         102 Jun 27 10:32 Windows Vista Ultimate.vmx.lck
-rw-r--r--@   1   staff        8469 Jun 27 12:43 Windows Vista Ultimate.vmxf
-rw-r--r--    1   staff      139241 Jun 27 12:47 vmware-0.log
-rw-r--r--    1   staff      149439 Jun 27 12:45 vmware-1.log
-rw-r--r--    1   staff      126150 Jun 27 12:40 vmware-2.log
-rw-r--r--    1   staff      178839 Jun 27 12:58 vmware.log



I'm running Fusion Version 2.0.5 (173382) on 10.5.7
All help is greatly appreciated!!

Click to view RvPLaN's profile Novice 6 posts since
Mar 28, 2009

Hello Brevemike,

I red that you experienced disk problem with version 2.0.5 build 173382.

Could you read my post here and tell us if it's ring the bell? I mean: do you see any similarity with which I described.

Because, until this version and build, I never had any (virtual) disk problem and slowness in the host system.

Thanx for any ping back. Regards.

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