VM on external drive is corrupt - how to recover?

[madparakeet]

I have a VM on an external drive, which somehow ended up getting corrupted. I got the following message:

VMware Fusion cannot synchronize with the disk before canceling.

Disk /Volumes/SSD/XXXXXX.vmwarevm/Virtual Disk-000008-s031.vmdk may be inconsistent.

The 512 GB drive is almost completely full (I was also using snapshots). My host only has ~200 GB free. The VM is encrypted, and as a result the .vmx file needs to be decrypted in order to make any changes to it, but I was not able to disable encryption because the drive did not have enough free space.

Right now if I try to run the VM, all I see is an error dialog saying "Internal Error". All I'm able to do right now is to see the package contents of the VM, which has a whole bunch of .vmdk files.

Is there any way for me to recover the vm?

[madparakeet · Accepted solution]

I managed to recover it by following the steps below:

1. Move the VM to a much larger external drive.
2. Delete all snapshots
3. Disable encryption (takes a VERY long time)
4. Perform disk cleanup (takes a VERY long time)
1. Despite recovering space, the actual VM image itself will still show the original size.
5. Open the VM from the new location
6. Do command line VMWare Tools shrink option (This did not shrink the VM image at all, unfortunately, but at least the vm was recovered)

[wila]

Hi,

Shrink can work for any guest OS, but it depends on the guest OS on how-to approach that.

See here for a few ways on how-to do that:

https://www.vi-toolkit.com/wiki/index.php/Shrink_guest_on_hosted_platform

--
Wil