VMware Cloud Community
stripling20
Contributor
Contributor

Recovering accidental deleted VM's in ESX4.0

Hi,

I accidently deleted a VM (centos) in ESX-4.0 and was not able to recover the data on the same. Could any one please help on this.


ESX server was configured with RAID-1 (DISK MIRRORING) which is a local disk but no backup utility was used/configured.


Troubleshooting steps tried:

I tried rescaning the Datastore and VMFS but no luck;

Created new VM with custom mode to use existing vmdk file to see if the deleted file present on Datastore, again no luch Smiley Sad

I remember few file names which resides in deleted VM, By anychance is it possible to recover those files, atleast.



Regards,

Rajesh R

9740099933

0 Kudos
4 Replies
schepp
Leadership
Leadership

Hi and welcome to the communities,

If you clicked "remove from inventory" in the vSphere client, your VM will still be on the Datastore and is just not shown on the ESXi host.

If you clicked "delete from disk", you are out of luck. There is no undelete in VMFS and if you didn't do a backup, the files are gone.

Regards

0 Kudos
stripling20
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for your reply Tim.

Yes, I did "delete from disk". So VM folder got deleted from the Datastore and hence no flat file available to recover rest of the files Smiley Sad

Trying for my luck if anybody has a magic code to recover it :smileycool:

0 Kudos
virtualinstall
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

In the abcense of any backups I wonder if a data recovery tool would help?  I have not used anything like this for VMFS but something like this http://www.diskinternals.com/vmfs-recovery/

stripling20
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the info. unfortunately trail version din't help, trying to get the full version or let me know if you have the registration key :smileysilly:

0 Kudos