VMWorkstation 12 - -s001.vmdk file is gone - logfile shows corruption - recoverable?

[ElSteveGA]

I had a VM running Win7x64 & went to start it today and recieve "Unable to open file "z:\wmare\bcc.vmdk" the system cannot find the file specified."

On closer examination, the bcc.vmdk file is present and not corrupt; however the BCC-S001.vmdk file is gone. Searching the logs find a reference to that file being corrupted.

I've attached the logs, main .vmdk file, the .vmx and .vmxf in the zip

Do I have any chance to recover anything off of this VM?

thank you

edit: added the proper logs...

Message was edited by: Steven Dietz added the proper logs...

[continuum]

Hi
the vmdk has been edited:

# Disk DescriptorFile

version=1

encoding="windows-1252"

CID=51865a4b

parentCID=ffffffff

isNativeSnapshot="no"

createType="twoGbMaxExtentSparse"

# Extent description

#RW 19660800 SPARSE "BCC-s001.vmdk"

RW 0 SPARSE "BCC-s001.vmdk"

....

Please explain why and when this has been done.
When the first slice is missing all you can hope for is recovering files with a tool like UFS-explorer.
Ulli

[ElSteveGA]

Thanks for your reply.

The commented out section was me trying to get the vm to mount as mapped storage (to no avail)

Thanks for the heads-up on UFS explorer, I'll give that a try.

[continuum]

do you have any version of that s001.vmdk ?

[ElSteveGA]

Unfortunately I do not.

I did take a backup copy of the directory and installed a fresh copy of win 7 on it; then immediately ran Recuva in advanced mode looking for lost files. I was able to recover a wallet.dat that I was looking for, however the BitcoinCore wallet says it's corrupted. (sigh)

I've checked 8 of the 32 -s###.vmdk files the UFS Explorer Pro - no luck yet... (right-click, recover lost data, scan for file system is ssslllooowww...)

[continuum]

Thats not what I would do.
Create a temporary vmdk with same specs with Windows 7.
Then steal name-s001.vmdk from that temp vmdk and replace the missing file in the corrupted vmdk.
Next use this makeshift repaired vmdk inside a VM that has UFS-explorer installed.
By the way - if you use your VMs to store expensive data then do NOT use growing type split vmdks.
Instead use preallocated one piece vmdks.
The times when split growing vmdks could be regarded as stable enough for important use are gone.
Last version I consider as stable enough to use growing vmdks was Workstation 7 :smileycry:

[ElSteveGA]

Thank you for the suggestion - I'm currently giving it a go and will report back with an update.

Good info on the split vmdk's - once this process is done I will be updating/restaging my other VM's to pre-allocated one piece models.

[ElSteveGA]

Just a brief update - UFS Explorer found 50+ NTFS volumes when scanning the mounted file system - going through each one is proving to be a very time consuming task. I estimate I'm 80% finished and so far have recovered 39 potential files - all of which have been corrupt.

I will keep scanning & cross my fingers.

Thanks again for all your help.