Pressed Delete Selected Items while browsing datastore and accidentally deleted vmdk file that has OS on it

[milesmeridith]

I accidentally deleted the vmdk file that has my OS on it by hitting the "delete selected items" button in the datastore brower window. Is there anyway to recover? I have a snapshot that doesn't seem to be working. There is still at VMDK file in there but now it has "delta" added on to the end of it. Now I get an error message when I try to turn on my VM saying it can't find the vmdk file., naturally.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

From the screen shots it looks like you only deleted the .vmdk descriptor files which can be recreated. To ensure this is the case, please provide a complete list of files in the VM's folder and attach the latest vmware.log file (from the working VM) to a reply post to see the required details.

André

[milesmeridith]

Awesome. Please note that the rest of the VM's files are in a different folder. I've attached a screenshot of that folder

[continuum]

Datastorebrowser has a bug - it displays vmdks not correctly - so for purposes likes this use WinSCP or Veeam or Putty or a tool that displays vmdks correctly.
Also make sure that when posting screenshots you size the columns in a way that the relevant parts are displayed - this one is not very helpful

[a_p_]

I do have a small doubt and would like to ask you to use e.g. WinSCP and download the two .vmdk descriptor files "IC1-ermc 4.0.vmdk" as well as "IC1-ermc 4.0-000001.vmdk" (they are only a few hundred bytes in size when you look at them using WinSCP), compress/zip them and attach the .zip file to a reply post. I can then rebuild the missing descriptor files using these files as templates.

André

[milesmeridith]

attached. Let me know if I did something wrong. Thanks so much!

[a_p_]

What I am worried about is the spelling of the delta disk with the upper case "D" in the file name, which is unusual. Anyway, I attached a zip file with the two missing descriptor files. After extracting the .zip file and uploading the two .vmdk files to the datastore, you shuld see the names of the descriptor files with the size of the flat/delta files.

André

[milesmeridith]

AP,

The reason I think it is capitalized is because I tried changing the name of the file to match the name of the file that it said was missing because I thought that maybe for some reason it added that on the end. (obviously have no idea what I'm doing). So after that didn't work I renamed it to what I thought it was before. I just tried to rename it again with out the capitalized D ...I clicked rename and then it said that file already exists would you like to replace it and I said yes and then it gave me an error saying it couldn't find it and then boom the file disappeared. So no this is what that folder looks like. Hope I didn't just screw up more.

[a_p_]

The good news is that you freed up ~344MB on the datastore, the bad news is that you just lost ~344 MB of changes for this virtual disk, i.e. if nothing else goes wrong you will see the data from the time you created the snapshot. What we may now need to do - in addition to repairing the virtual disk - is to modify the VM's configuration. Before we do this, I'd like to know whether this virtual machine acts as a Domain Controller and whether there are other servers/DCs in the domain. Powering on the VM without taking care of this could result in serious issues!

André

[milesmeridith]

It is not a domain controller. It is a VoIP test server. I don't mind if I lost the changes that has happened since I did the snapshot.

[a_p_]

Ok, in this case extract the files in the attached archive and upload them to the datastore. This should allow you to power on the VM again without additional modifications to the configuration.

André

[milesmeridith]

You're my hero! Thank you, I'm up and running!