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9 Replies Last post: Jun 6, 2009 11:36 AM by NickDePasquale  

Disk Error on Fusion Beta 3 posted: May 16, 2007 3:59 AM

Click to view Brad Leggat's profile Novice 7 posts since
Jan 25, 2007
Please help, Urgently need to recover some data from Virtual Disks.

I have an XP VM with two Virtual Disks, and I took 1 snapshot about 3 months ago.

Suddenly today, when starting VM, I get an error message :

"Cannot open the disk ...0001.vmdk"
"Reason: The parent virtual Disk has been modified since the child was created"

I did nothing out of th ordinary to modify the parent disk.

Is there any way to fix this, or to recover new data off the disks since the snapshot?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks in advance, Brad

Re: Disk Error on Fusion Beta 3

1. May 16, 2007 7:39 AM in response to: Brad Leggat
Click to view etung's profile Guru 11,086 posts since
Oct 15, 2006
The first thing I would do is make a backup of all of the VM's files.

Does it actually say "...0001.vmdk" or is that you editing for privacy? If it's the actual message, before you start fiddling with the disks, you might want to check the vmx and files.

Having done that, this thread may help - you may be able to change the vmdk files to make Fusion think the parent hasn't changed and hope that it hasn't actually changed that much. Then copy all the data off, check it, and start with a fresh VM since you don't know how badly the original is corrupted. Also try searching in other forums, since this isn't Fusion-specific.

Re: Disk Error on Fusion Beta 3

4. May 17, 2007 6:37 AM in response to: Brad Leggat
Click to view etung's profile Guru 11,086 posts since
Oct 15, 2006
The timestamp is actually in the vmdk files. At least for 2GB sparse files, there's a small plaintext metadata file and a (set of) large binary data file(s). The metadata file has fields called "CID" and "parentCID" - what you want to do is make sure the parentCID of the snapshot matches the CID of the base disk. I'm not sure what you'd do for monolithic files (which yours sound like), I can try to do some more digging later.

In the meantime, the following links may be helpful:
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=520002
http://www.ozvms.com/content/view/159/
http://www.google.com/search?q=vmdk+CID+parentCID

Re: Disk Error on Fusion Beta 3

6. May 21, 2007 6:58 AM in response to: Brad Leggat
Click to view etung's profile Guru 11,086 posts since
Oct 15, 2006
Cool, glad to hear it worked. You should probably create a new VM instead of continuing to use the old one, because who knows what's wrong with it. If this happens again or you figure out what triggered this, please let us know.

Re: Disk Error on Fusion Beta 3

8. May 21, 2007 7:15 AM in response to: Brad Leggat
Click to view etung's profile Guru 11,086 posts since
Oct 15, 2006
Good detective work - I suspect the problem was moving the folder while the VM was running; I've moved around powered-down VMs with snapshots without problems. Please file a bug about this.

Edit: Was the failed operation a suspend or snapshot? I just want to be really clear about what went wrong. -etung 2007.05.21 10:15

Re: Disk Error on Fusion Beta 3

9. Jun 6, 2009 11:36 AM in response to: etung
Click to view NickDePasquale's profile Lurker 1 posts since
Jun 6, 2009
Hello... I picked up this thread and helped me fix an issue i was having. So, thanks many moons later! Nick

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