I am unable to open .vmdk files in fusion 11.5.3, please help.

[425PM]

I have all .vmdk files along with .vmx file. They are exactly same location and takes up 560GB space on my SSD yet Fusion is telling me that it can open it because it is unable to find the file specified. Please help.

[425PM]

Here is the list of files in my Virtual Machines>Windows folder (see attached). Please help....thanks.

[a_p_]

Some details will help.
To start with, please run ls -l  in the VM's folder to list the VM's files and paste the text output into your next reply.

André

[425PM]

Done. Please see my other message...Attached here again.

[Mikero]

Doesn't look like the command was run as requested... I would expect to see output like the following:

> ls -l
total 2939008
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     270840 Aug 26 10:16 Photon Test.nvram
-rw-r--r--  1 mike  staff        693 Aug 30 12:09 Photon Test.plist
-rw-r--r--  1 mike  staff          0 Aug 26 10:11 Photon Test.vmsd
-rwxr-xr-x  1 mike  staff       2995 Aug 26 10:25 Photon Test.vmx
-rw-r--r--  1 mike  staff        266 Aug 26 10:11 Photon Test.vmxf
-rw-------  1 mike  staff  494010368 Aug 26 10:25 Virtual Disk-s001.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff    1048576 Aug 26 10:25 Virtual Disk-s002.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff      65536 Aug 26 10:11 Virtual Disk-s003.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     917504 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s004.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff  498991104 Aug 26 10:25 Virtual Disk-s005.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff  300679168 Aug 26 10:25 Virtual Disk-s006.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff   90243072 Aug 26 10:25 Virtual Disk-s007.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     851968 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s008.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     720896 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s009.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     655360 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s010.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     655360 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s011.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff    5570560 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s012.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     655360 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s013.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff   71892992 Aug 26 10:25 Virtual Disk-s014.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     655360 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s015.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     655360 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s016.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     851968 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s017.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     655360 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s018.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     655360 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s019.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff   23789568 Aug 26 10:25 Virtual Disk-s020.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     917504 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s021.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff    6029312 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s022.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     851968 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s023.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     720896 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s024.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     655360 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s025.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     655360 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s026.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff     196608 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk-s027.vmdk
-rw-------  1 mike  staff       1587 Aug 26 10:15 Virtual Disk.vmdk
-rw-r--r--  1 mike  staff       1044 Aug 30 12:09 startMenu.plist
-rw-r--r--  1 mike  staff       8192 Aug 26 10:13 vm.scoreboard
-rw-r--r--  1 mike  staff     218329 Aug 26 10:25 vmware.log
~/Virtual Machines.localized/Photon Test.vmwarevm

 (note that you can see the attributes beyond just the filename).

Also, what is the exact error you're getting?

[a_p_]

I just saw previous your reply after I posted mine 😉

According to the listing, a bunch of the base virtual disk files (Virtual Disk-s###.vmdk) is missing!

André

[425PM]

Here you go...directory list is attached along with screenshot of the error.

The error is

"Unable to open file "/Users/zibdy/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows.vmwarevm/Virtual Disk.vmdk". The system cannot find the file specified.

[Mikero]

Looks like you're missing a big chunk of your base virtual disk:

-rw-rw-r--@   1 zibdy  staff    499056640 May  1 18:46 Virtual Disk-s016.vmdk
-rw-rw-r--@   1 zibdy  staff    475529216 May  1 18:46 Virtual Disk-s033.vmdk

I would expect to see slices 17-32 there (i.e. Virtual Disk-s017 [...] -s032.vmdk)

Did you restore from a Time Machine backup or something?
A part of the story is missing, along with those disk files.

Time Machine will only back up files that have changed since the last backup, so it never backs up Virtual Machines in a comprehensive way.  So restoring it can be challenging as you might have to go into your older backups to find those specific disk slices.

[425PM]

Michael,

I have never setup or used Timemachine on this mac so there was no recovery done with Time machine. I would take whatever I can get back. Thanks for your help.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Do you have the automatic 'move files to icloud' option enabled, or anything else that manages files/storage in the background?

[425PM]

No, I will be happy if I can get this VM back up even with partial recovery.

[a_p_]

Two things that you may want to check - before we take a look at what's possible to recover data from the existing file - is whether the missing files are in the lost&found folder, or have been quarantined by your virus protection application.

André

[425PM]

Andre, I couldn't find lost+found folder on this machine and there is no anti-virus on this machine. 

[a_p_]

Please compress/zip the vmware.log along with the 11 .vmdk descriptor files (the small ones without -s0xx in their file name), and attach the .zip archive to a reply post.

André

[425PM]

Andre,

Here you the files you have asked are attached. I have included some extra files too. Thanks for your help.

[a_p_]

FYI: The files that I've asked for mainly contain metadata, whereas some of the additional files that you've posted also contain user data (memory dumps).

Anyway, Ive created stub files that you can use to replace the missing .vmdk files by creating an new 60GB virtual disk, and then expanding it to 198GB. The files will fix the virtual disk as such, but due to the missing data, you won't be able to boot the VM, and need to use some data recovery tools to recover data from the virtual disk. I'm not familiar with such applications on MacOS, but maybe @wila or @Mikero have an idea!?
What should be possible is to create another temporary (helper) VM with the same guest OS as the corrupted one, then attach the corrupted virtual disk to this VM as a secondary disk, and run a data recovery tool from within the guest OS.

Either way, what you should do at this point - unless already done - is to backup the VM's current folder/files! Also create a new snapshot after replacing the missing files from the attached .zip archive. This should result in "Virtual Disk-000011.vmdk" being the VM's active virtual disk file (see entry in .vmx file), which is the one that you need to open/attach to another (helper) VM.

As a side note: According to the information in the vmware.log file, you ran out of disk space on July, 5th. Did you run some cleanup tools, or delete files to free up disk space?

André

[wila]

... looks like the log files already have been removed again ... not making it easier to help.

Oh well.

When you miss disk slices  1 to 15 and slices 17 to 32... then things can get really difficult for disk recovery software as there are no file allocation tables or anything like that. Perhaps there's enough info in the snapshots, but the chances that the data in there is too corrupt to use is more likely.

So the only type of data recovery software that will work is something like Scalpel from Sleuthkit

It won't get you file names (as that data is most likely gone), but it might get some data out, if it is important enough to spent the time on finding it.

--
Wil

[425PM]

Hi Wil,

Here are the files again. I removed them only to remove few files as Andre had suggested. 

Thanks for your help.

[425PM]

Hi Andre, 

Thanks. I have a complete backup of the Virtual Machines folder. I will wait to see what Wil and Mikero suggest then follow-up your instruction. I will definitely keep posting the status updates.

Regarding running clean-up on July 5th, this machine is rarely used for Xcode and VS 2019 work and around July 5th I decided to update Windows on my VM. As soon as the update started it gave me a warning of disk full which is not possible given the hard drive is 1TB and there is very little activity on it. The machine gave me 2 pop-up and I did not read properly and clicked "OK". Since then I have been dealing with this mess and I have spent countless hours bringing things back together. 

The lesson was learned in a very hard way. 🙂

[wila]

Hi,

OK, so you are on 10.15.7..
Your file system is going to be either APFS or HFS.

For APFS you might have snapshots open... and if you are lucky one of those snapshots has the missing files.

See what the output is of:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

I take it that you already searched in Finder for the missing disk slices? (In case they got misplaced, unlikely, but worth a shot)

If the above doesn't help, then you would need recovery software for APFS or HFS to see if you can somehow locate the slices that have gone missing.
There are some tools for APFS, like this one: https://github.com/cugu/afro

Beyond that.. this page might help: https://forensicswiki.xyz/wiki/index.php?title=Tools:Data_Recovery

--
Wil