I will try to keep this brief!
VM froze up and wouldn't power on. It was unable to find one of its disk files. I browse into the datastore and it is empty.
I immediately open a case with VMWare Support and the engineer sees that the partition table is corrupted. So he tries to recreate the partition table and it fails. I did a .dd of the disk and upload it to him- he says the data is gone and there is nothing he can do and closes the ticket. He has also unmounted the disk in the process.
I don't usually accept that as an answer ha- and I use OSFMount to mount the DD file to my desktop. Then I run DiskInternals VMFS Recovery 1.5 on that mounted disk. It goes through and finds the following:
That is the disk file for the disk I need! Of course, I can't recover the file without purchasing the program at $699. Yikes! So- there has to be a way to get this file with this information right?
Here is the current partition table of that disk. I could try recreating the partition table but I will admit- I am kinda new to it. I know the VMFS partition is a VMFS3 using a 4MB block size because the size of this VMDK is 520GB.
When I try to add the storage to one of the hosts, it finds the VMFS partition and wants to overwrite it.
I do an esxcfg-volume -l to try to see if resignaturing is preventing a Rescan from picking up the VMFS volume, it doesn't list any results.
When I do an fdisk -l on the device, I see the following info:
Keep in mind this is how the VMWare Support Engineer rebuilt the partition table- maybe it isn't right if he wasn't aware it was a 4MB block size?
At this point should I just eat the $700 and recover the -flat.vmdk file? Or is there any partition wizards out there that can help me? I am so close to tasting victory!
