Recovery Help

[Nmh]

Good Evening all,

Sorry I am new here and have came with a bit of an issue that if possiable would like some help with.

I am running esxi 5.5 and came home to one of my vm's powered off, I found this to be due to lack of disc space.  I saw a couple of files that had not been accessed for over a year so I thought it was safe to delete, oh how wrong was I .

It looks like the files I deleted where part of the data files that I had set as extra hard drives in the vm even though they was not listed in the settings it must have accused them as the vm can no longer boot my data drives.

I need to attempt to recover these, I have removed the 3tb drive from my esxi box so nothing is writing to it until I try the recovery, I found this tool:-

VMware Data Recovery Software — Adequate Tool to Repair VMDK File Corruption

Would  this be good to use or are there better methods?

I Am not sure how I would get my windows 7 machine to see the files on the removed esxi data drive, are there any guides or articles for me to follow?

Any help or advice would very much be appreciated,

Thank you for your time

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

try to contact continuum. He might be able to help, or at least give you some hints.

As for the files you deleted. These were most likely .vmdk files, and your VM is running with active snapshots (i.e. "<vmname>-00000X.vmdk" disk name(s)). In VMware products all .vmdk files in a snapshot chain are in use, but changes are only written to the last one in the chain. That's why the other files have an old time stamp.

André

[continuum]

Hi
I just downloaded that tool and tested it 10 minutes.
It can find Workstation VMs on NTFS and then mount NTFS-formatted vmdks.
It has no option to scan or read VMFS and thats why I doubt it will be able to help you.

The only commercial software that I can recommend without doubts is UFS-explorer.
Not because I get paid to adsvertise it but because I regularly use it as a quick diagnosis tool - for that the trial version is very good.

VMFS-fuse also has to be mentioned as the best freeware for the job. But in this case it will not help you.
Version 2.5.1 has a bug and can not extract vmdks larger than 256 GB so it is of little use for this case.

Anyway - let me have a look via Teamviewer - I need about 15 minutes to tell if there is a chance to extract the file without having to call Ontrack or other companies that play in that league.

Ulli
skype = sanbarrow

[Nmh]

Hello Andre and Continuum,

Thank you for your responses.

I have removed the data drive from my ESXI box for the moment, to have the best chance of getting the files back is it best to connect it back up  to the ESXI machine or connect to a Windows machine?

I am currently at work and am setting up a test machine where I have installed ESXI 5.5 and added two hard drives.  I will delete a files of the data drive and then use this to test, I thought this may be better to do it this way rather than using the original drive and creating myself further issues with things not working.  Once I have a method I can replicate on my home set up.

In regards to that software I found, I agree it will not be much good especially after I had an on-line chat with their support and they had no idea how their own tool works then decided to ignore me.

I will look at UFS-explorer.

With UFS-Explorer and the recovery section, which settings would I choose?

Recover File system Type: I think this is VMFS but I see no option for that, would I choose no file system(Pure IntelliRAW)

Thank you

[continuum]

UFS-explorer will show you VMFS-volumes in case you attached a former ESXi drive to your Windows host.
If you are working with an image file you created with dd - use the function "add storage"

You should not have to drill down to IntelliRAW at all.