Possible help to recover data from overwritten disk/vmfs partition?

[swinster]

OK, this is probably the dumbest thing I have ever done with my home lab. Yesterday, I installed a new server (as the old one failed) and moved the original disks to the new machine. All was well; the RAID array was recognised and imported with no issue. I then needed to get ESXI (v8, was v7) up and running and somehow installed VMware ESXi OSDATA partition onto the RAID 6 array, which initially contained a VMFS partition, thus completely repartitioning the disk and overwriting everything 😒.

The partition table will have gone, and I guess most/all of the data. Thick provisioning may have been used to create some VM disks, but I suspect most were not. I have backups of some things, but not everything. I have resigned myself to the fact that everything has gone, but if there is some magical way to can for raw data on an unaffected part of the disk, I would be willing to give it a go. 

What a pillock!

[swinster]

I want to return to this as I think there may be some light at the end of the tunnel and an opportunity to turn this into a learning exercise :). 

I recovered some of the VMs from the backups, which I restored to another data store, so that was good. However, on the problem data store, I was able to scan for potentially lost VMDKs, which seemed to indicate that there might be something to recover. I used a trial version of "DiskInternal VMFS Recovery", which showed the following, although to recover items would require a $999 license, so beyond the scope of this exercise:

I also created a VMFS-Header-dump (using this article - https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-vSphere-Documents/Create-a-VMFS-Header-dump-using-an-ESXi-H...), and extracted some stuff that can at least be read, albeit, I don't know what can be done with the data (if anything):

Again, this may be wishful thinking, but as I am not using this data store for anything else, so I have time to see what might be possible.

Any thoughts from anyone?