Missing file problem

[W6JHB]

Hi - tried starting up one of my virtual machines - a Windows 10, 64 bit machine and get the following error:

Unable to open file "/Users/W6JHB/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows 10 x64 - W6JHB.vmwarevm/Virtual Disk-000002.vmdk":

I have a Mac Time Machine backup but it only goes back a couple days due to some hard drive replacement issues. Is there any way to rebuild/recover this file without completely starting over with this VM? I can do that, but it will take a LOT of time, is a major PITA, and not something I really want to go through.

I'm running Fusion 8.5.9 on an iMac with El Capitan, 10.11.6

Any ideas?

[wila]

Hi,

Time Machine is not a suitable backup mechanism for virtual machines, see also: VMware Knowledge Base

Please attach a problem report to your reply down here (Help -> Collect Support Information)

Also please run the following command in a terminal and attach the file filesList.txt that you can find on your desktop here:

ls -alF "/Users/W6JHB/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows 10 x64 - W6JHB.vmwarevm/" > ~/Desktop/filesList.txt

Also before you do anything else: make a copy of your VM to an external disk.

--

Wil

[W6JHB]

Thanks for the reply! Ran the two tasks and have attached them to this reply...

Jim

[a_p_]

Two important files are missing "Virtual Disk-000001-s001.vmdk", and "Virtual Disk-000002-s001.vmdk". Unfortunately, these are the first of the 32 files, which make up the virtual disks (snapshots in this case), and most likely contain the guests file allocation table. With a missing, or corrupt FAT it's usually required to use some 3rd party tool to recover files on the guest file system.

However, from the .vmdk files' sizes, it seems to me that the guest has multiple partitions, with the important data on the second one? If this is the case, and you are lucky, it might be possible to fix this issue without data loss/corruption (without guarantee). What you may do - after backing up all files as already recommended by wila - is to replace the two missing files with ones that only contain metadata. To do this run a binary compare between two of the other files (e.g. Virtual Disk-000002-s025.vmdk, and Virtual Disk-000002-s026.vmdk), and if they match copy, and rename one of them to the missing files' names.

André

[W6JHB]

Ran a compare - not the same.

Oh well - probably best to start off with a fresh copy of Windows and re-install my applications, rather than having something cobbled back together that might break somewhere in the future anyway. 😞

What is the best way to blast that broken guest and all files associated with it, including snapshots, etc.?

Jim

[a_p_]

If you don't need the VM (i.e. the data within the guest OS), you can simply delete it in Fusion.

However, to avoid the need to reinstall the guest, you could also revert to the first snapshot. If you want to do this, replace the missing files with other ones (any one of the 7405568 bytes files should do), and then use the Snapshot Manager to revert to the first snapshot (sthe VM's state on Dec, 25th).

After reverting, consider to delete the snapshots from the Snapshot Manager to free up disk space.

André

[W6JHB]

Well, after renaming the file(s), the snapshots still do not restore. It was a gallant effort, but at this point I'm just going to start out fresh and be at peace with it.

Thanks for your help folks - we tried! 🙂