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dbaskin
Contributor
Contributor

HELP! deleted disk

So i was creating new virtual machines and I mounted a 2nd disk into a VM and then deleted the VM without unmoutning that 2nd disk. And it deleted the VM's disk and the 2nd disk as well.

Is my 100GB's of data gone for ever?

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8 Replies
depping
Leadership
Leadership

Chances are really big you lost the data if you pressed "remove from disk". You could however always phone support and see if they can recover the file cause normally only a pointer is removed. But this is only usefull if you haven't already created new VMs on the volume.

Duncan

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jcck20007
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

yes phone support to see what they can do,

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dbaskin
Contributor
Contributor

i created 1 new VM right after I deleted the other one, before I saw the disk was gone.

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dbaskin
Contributor
Contributor

I have another VM that is shut down that also had that disk mounted as a 2nd drive. anyway to use that information to point back to the VMDK?

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Erik_Zandboer
Expert
Expert

Nope. The disk mounted is just a refer to a file on disk (which is gone now)... Shame the 2nd VM was shutdown, otherwise your data would have been locked and the remove would have failed... Anyway, get on the phone with support. I do not see any other way you'll get your data back. Changes are thin as it stands now I think, do not try anything with the LUN the data was on until you spoke with VMware support. Any writing to the LUN might kill the data...

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dbaskin
Contributor
Contributor

so if I pull one of my raid drives and plug it into another machine, is there any software that can scan for data in the VMDK on the VMFS?

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dbaskin
Contributor
Contributor

So I did pull one of the two 640GB disks in my raid 1 array. I purchased UFS Explorer Pro and did an advanced data scan. It was able to recover common file types such as JPG, TXT, DOC, XLS, etc...

I havn't been able to locate my quicken data file .QDF but other than that I think I was able to recover all my data files I need.

UFS Explorer did not find any file system or folder structure or file names so all the deteced file are RANDOM#.JPG or RANDOM#.TXT. The data that is stored inside files like for images EXIF and word files the Author are intact so I was able to indentify my data by a combination of looking at file sizes + adding additional fields to the display in windows.

It is a lot of work but it did get my data back.

Hope that helps someone else.

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dbaskin
Contributor
Contributor

Also the advanced data scan took about 1 hour per GB.

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