VMFS Recovery Possible?

[Sandw0rm]

Hi,

Basically it looks like someone has formatted one of the datastores. No other information has been written onto the datastore (touch wood). I wondered if it was possible to unformat it?

Many thanks.

[a_p_]

Depends on what you see. In any case you have to be careful.

- If you see the datatstore in the storage tab/datastore browser, but it is empty, then only either VMware or a data recovery company may be able to help you.

- If you see the LUN but not a datastore on it, it may be an issue with the partition table and you may be able to recover the datastore by recovering the partition table. See http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002281 for details.

André

[AndreTheGiant]

A recovery could be not possible or take too much time.

See also:

Andre

[idle-jam]

If you have a support with VMware, i would highly recommend you creating a SR for it. I always have them do it for me, and they were pretty fast and accurate (i could not concentrate during those times ..)

iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

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[SmokinJoe]

yes, I know of a situation where the VMFS FC SAN LUN was overwritten by an ESX install and the virtual machines were recovered, or at least one was that was not on a tape backup.  The software was cheap, like $99.

you need to DD the LUN to a firewire disk/SATA/eSATA from the service console so you can run this windows utility on the raw blocks.

my LUN was over 2tb so I had to get a 3TB external usb drive, RAID0

install the software on your windows machine

scan the disk for formatted NTFS drives, recover what you need.

I think I made a disk image from the partition and restored that to VMware via ghost

then had to do a repair I think to get the OS to be bootable

LSOFT.NET - Partition recovery or File recovery

I ended up buying File Recovery, Partition Recovery and Disk Image for businesses as I was so happy to get that server back and not have to install it from scratch or a very old backup.

I suggest all LUNs be 1.8tb or smaller. 🙂

Thanks,

Joe