How to recover an accidentally deleted thin-provisioned disks from flat.vmdk?

[pqkong]

Dear all,

I have 2 disks. 1 thin provisioned 150gb & 1 thick provisioned lazy zeroed 150gb.

I accidentally deleted the thin-provisioned OS disk, which contains all of the important data from Vsphere. The other disk is empty, and are added before deletion of the first one. I still have the flat.vmdk, and when I scan the file with VMFS Recovery, I think (?) there are some bits of data left inside it. Can I recover the OS disk from this?

Assistance much needed. Thanks in advance.

[markey165]

@pqkong - So the flat file is the actual virtual disk that contains the data, and the same named .vmdk is just a descriptor file that has a pointer reference to the flat file. You can see how this works by downloading any .vmdk file (obviously not the flat file) and opening it in notepad etc

What are the contents of GIT_backup.vmdk? As that looks like the corresponding descriptor file, or has it got messed up?

Either way if you have deleted or messed up the original descriptor .vmdk you should be able to reconstruct it by following the VMware KB below

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1002511

HTH

[BarryGrowler]

You can recover it by creating a new descriptor .vmdk file that points to the flat.vmdk. Check VMware KB 1002511 for how to write this descriptor. Once done, reattach the disk to your VM in vSphere using the new descriptor file. This should restore access to your data.