VMDK has one or more internal errors that cannot be fixed

[mfaster]

Please help.  I get this error after aborted clean up of VM.

Running Fusion 12.1.0 on Mac OS Catalina 10.15.7

I am attaching zipped log files.  

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

I can't promise you anything, but if you don't have a recent backup, I can take a deeper look at this.

As a first step, and to see what can be done,

• open a terminal window, and go to the VM's .vmwarevm folder
• run: ls -l > filelist.txt (to create a file listing, which contains all of the VM's files with their file names, sizes, time stamps, ...)
• run: dd if="Windows 7 x64.vmdk" of="Metadata-1536.bin" bs=1536 count=1
• then compress/zip filelist.txt, an Metadata-1536.bin, and attach the .zip archive to a reply post.

Based on the results, I will then provide you with another dd command, to extract all metadata (no userdata) from the .vmdk file.

André

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

I can't promise you anything, but if you don't have a recent backup, I can take a deeper look at this.

As a first step, and to see what can be done,

• open a terminal window, and go to the VM's .vmwarevm folder
• run: ls -l > filelist.txt (to create a file listing, which contains all of the VM's files with their file names, sizes, time stamps, ...)
• run: dd if="Windows 7 x64.vmdk" of="Metadata-1536.bin" bs=1536 count=1
• then compress/zip filelist.txt, an Metadata-1536.bin, and attach the .zip archive to a reply post.

Based on the results, I will then provide you with another dd command, to extract all metadata (no userdata) from the .vmdk file.

André

[a_p_]

As a first step, and to see what can be done,

• open a terminal window, and go to the VM's .vmwarevm folder
• run: ls -l > filelist.txt (to create a file listing, which contains all of the VM's files with their file names, sizes, time stamps, ...)
• run: dd if="Windows 7 x64.vmdk" of="Metadata-1536.bin" bs=1536 count=1
• then compress/zip filelist.txt, an Metadata-1536.bin, and attach the .zip archive to a reply post.

Based on the results, I will then provide you with another dd command, to extract all metadata (no userdata) from the .vmdk file.

André

[mfaster]

Thank you for the reply/response.   While I do not have a back up, I do still have access to all of the user data as I was sharing the disk between the Mac OS Host and the Win10 Documents folders.

I will perform the steps you suggested and upload later today or this week.

I am weighing path of least effort to recover:

• if some cmds executed against VMDK can bring it back to life
• rebuild clean Win10 VM with apps and reconnect to Data
• Abandon all hope on Win10 VM and convert app functionality all to Mac(basic office apps) only remaining requirement for windows is redirected printing from a windows server to the local Windows network printer, and I may get that working on the Mac as well.

Sorry for the TMI(too much info) but wanted to provide context/priority guidance as I don't consider my situation to be the emergency some other folks faced on this thread

[mfaster]

Here are the requested files

[a_p_]

According to the file, the metadata occupies 53,888 sectors, so please run

dd if="Windows 7 x64.vmdk" of="Metadata-full.bin" bs=512 count=53888

then compress/zip Metadata-full.bin, and attach the .zip archive to a reply post.

André

Evaluation result:

		Offset	Lenght	Value	Dezimal
unint32	magicNumber;	0	4	56 4D 44 4B	VMDK
unint32	version;	4	4	00 00 00 01	1
unint32	flags;	8	4	00 00 00 03	3
SectorType	capacity;	12	8	00 00 00 00 1A 40 00 00	440.401.920
SectorType	grainSize;	20	8	00 00 00 00 00 00 00 80	128
SectorType	descriptorOffset;	28	8	00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01	1
SectorType	descriptorSize;	36	8	00 00 00 00 00 00 00 14	20
unint32	numGTEsPerGT;	44	4	00 00 02 00	512
SectorType	rgdOffset;	48	8	00 00 00 00 00 00 00 15	21
SectorType	gdOffset;	56	8	00 00 00 00 00 00 69 4A	26.954
SectorType	overHead;	64	8	00 00 00 00 00 00 D2 80	53.888
Bool	uncleanShutdown;	72	1	01	1
char	singleEndLineChar;	73	1	0A	10
char	nonEndLineChar;	74	1	20	32
char	doubleEndLineChar1;	75	1	0D	13
char	doubleEndLineChar2;	76	1	0A	10
uint16	compressAlgorithm;	77	2	00 00	0

[mfaster]

Here's the resulting Metadata-full.bin

[mfaster]

oops I didn't mean to mark this as Corrected...can you incorrect this for now?

Thanks,  Mike

[a_p_]

With the aborted clean operation, it's unpredictable in which exact state the cleanup has been terminated, and I had to make a couple of assumptions to at least fix the metadata, so that the virtual disk should be recognized as such again.

Please extract the "Metadata-fixed.bin" from the attached .zip archive, copy it to the VM's folder, and run the following two commands.
dd if="Metadata-fixed.bin" of="Windows 7 x64.vmdk" bs=512 count=53888 conv=notrunc
dd if=/dev/null of="Windows 7 x64.vmdk" bs=1 seek=111530147840 count=1

Line 1 will replace the corrupted metadata
Line 2 will truncate the .vmdk file to the expected size

I strongly recommend that - unless already done - you backup the .vmdk file before making the modifications.
Please note that there's also a high chance of file system corruption within the guest OS.

Prior to powering on the VM with the fixed metadata, take a VM snapshot, so that you can revert to it in case it's necessary.

André