Unable to boot vm after deleting oldest snapshot

[paul_xedos]

Hi,

Its actually a bit more complicated than that. The vm has nighly snapshots created over a week. Last night the system ran out of space and the newest snapshot was unable to be created. I created some space, started the machine up then deleted the oldest snapshot. I think the vm then crashed and now its complaining about not being open to the oldest snapshot disk. "The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created".

I'm hoping its an easy-ish fix but reluctant to expeirment in case I make things worse

Thanks

Paul

[paul_xedos]

Looking through similar postings it seems a case of modifying CIDs to reflect the true parent.The current sequence is as follows:-

hosta-000001.vmdk:CID=e78bf898

hosta-000001.vmdk:parentCID=26fc3ce8

hosta-000002.vmdk:CID=cacbf261

hosta-000002.vmdk:parentCID=d7dc36c4

hosta-000003.vmdk:CID=cf5915cd

hosta-000003.vmdk:parentCID=cacbf261

hosta-000004.vmdk:CID=1f4f7f00

hosta-000004.vmdk:parentCID=cf5915cd

hosta-000005.vmdk:CID=1abcebd9

hosta-000005.vmdk:parentCID=1f4f7f00

hosta.vmdk:CID=e78bf898

hosta.vmdk:parentCID=ffffffff

The datestamps of the delta.vmdk files are:-

-rw------- 1 root root 7549790208 Oct 10 11:07hosta-000001-delta.vmdk

-rw------- 1 root root 1157670912 Oct 11 11:07 hosta-000002-delta.vmdk

-rw------- 1 root root 5939177472 Oct 12 11:07 hosta-000003-delta.vmdk

-rw------- 1 root root 15015651328 Oct 13 11:08 hosta-000004-delta.vmdk

-rw------- 1 root root 12801058816 Oct 14 17:21 hosta-000005-delta.vmdk

which suggests the numbering order also reflects the true parent order

Things I've tried that have made no difference:-

changing hosta-000005.vmdk:parentCID to e78bf898 (to make 0001.vmdk the parent)

changing hosta-000004.vmdk:parentCID to 1abcebd9 (to make 0004.vmdk the parent)

In both cases the same error is returned

2009-10-14 19:39:27.166 'ha-eventmgr' 425999 info Event 4822 : Message on hosta in ha-datacenter: Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/494847e3-47b3b303-2a40-00145ef45f2c/hosta/hosta-000005.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.

Reason: The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created.

Any help or pointers would be great

Thanks

Paul

[paul_xedos]

All fixed now thanks to sifting through previous comments which all pointed to the CID chain being the problem

If you can get on to the console to issue a command (on esxi 3.5 its a case of typing ALt-F1 and then typing 'unsuppported' to get to the command line) a useful command to run within the virtual machine directory

egrep 'CID|vmdk' *.vmdk | tee -a vmdk.list

hosta-000001.vmdk:CID=d7dc36c4

hosta-000001.vmdk:#parentCID=26fc3ce8

hosta-000001.vmdk:parentCID=e78bf898

hosta-000001.vmdk:parentFileNameHint="hosta.vmdk"

hosta-000001.vmdk:RW 41943040 VMFSSPARSE "hosta-000001-delta.vmdk"

hosta-000002.vmdk:CID=cacbf261

hosta-000002.vmdk:parentCID=d7dc36c4

hosta-000002.vmdk:parentFileNameHint="hosta-000001.vmdk"

hosta-000002.vmdk:RW 41943040 VMFSSPARSE "hosta-000002-delta.vmdk"

hosta-000003.vmdk:CID=cf5915cd

hosta-000003.vmdk:parentCID=cacbf261

hosta-000003.vmdk:parentFileNameHint="hosta-000002.vmdk"

hosta-000003.vmdk:RW 41943040 VMFSSPARSE "hosta-000003-delta.vmdk"

hosta-000004.vmdk:CID=1f4f7f00

hosta-000004.vmdk:parentCID=cf5915cd

hosta-000004.vmdk:parentFileNameHint="hosta-000003.vmdk"

hosta-000004.vmdk:RW 41943040 VMFSSPARSE "hosta-000004-delta.vmdk"

hosta-000005.vmdk:CID=8acae0f9

hosta-000005.vmdk:parentCID=1f4f7f00

hosta-000005.vmdk:parentFileNameHint="hosta-000004.vmdk"

hosta-000005.vmdk:RW 41943040 VMFSSPARSE "hosta-000005-delta.vmdk"

hosta.vmdk:CID=e78bf898

hosta.vmdk:parentCID=ffffffff

hosta.vmdk:RW 41943040 VMFS "hosta-flat.vmdk"