Recover deleted datastore ESXI3.5

[BartdJ]

Hi, i'm running ESXI3.5 from a USB-stick with 2 SATA-drives. Accidentally i removed the wrong datastore and virtual machine. Is there a possbility to recover both with some un-delete function?

[AndreTheGiant]

Welcome to the community.

Have a look at:

Andre

[BartdJ]

Thanks Andre. I will look at the VMDK Recovery Tool. I don't understand the blocklist really. If the datastore and the vm is deleted, it stll shows up in the blocklist?

[AndreTheGiant]

How have you removed the datastore? From the vSphere client?

If yes you have only to recover the partition:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002281 - Recovering a lost partition table on a VMFS volume

Andre

[BartdJ]

I removed the datastore from the old Infrastructure Client 2.5 in the datastore browser. See the attachment, there is only 'fileserver' left, i removed 'webserver'. What do you advice me?

[AndreTheGiant]

So you have not remove a datastore, you have delete a folder on it.

In this case the file recovery is quite complex and maybe not possible.

You have to recover from the backups.

Andre

[BartdJ]

For every new vm the client creates a folder with the vmdk in it, so yeah the folder is deleted. It was not a very important vm so i don't have any backup of it, but i would love to get it back. But thanks for the help Andre.

[BartdJ]

Ok, i love to get some data back so i have tried something out. I took the harddrive from the server, put in in a Windows-machine and starting up UFS-Explorer. UFS-Explorer did a raw scan of the whole drive and voila, i get the data back that i needed! If you put the drive back the datastore is gone in the VI client and give the next error: "ALERT: LVM: 4482: vmhba0:0:0:3 may be snapshot: disabling access. See resignaturing section in SAN config guide."

To solve that i enabled resignaturing, did a rescan of the storage adapter and the datastore shows up in the client! Job done. :smileygrin: