VMX file is corrupt

[Thomas_97]

Hi all, i'm new in this community.

I ask some help because i lost a virtual machine with inside some work backups very important. I tried everything but nothing to do.

I started creating a new virtual machine with vmware pro 16 but when i select the .vmdk the system give me this information " this specified file is not a virtual disk"

i tried with the vmware-vdiskmanager from prompt to recreate the file but nothing to do.

if i start the virtual machine the system say "this vmx file is corrupt" and i don't know really how to recover the data inside.. is like a 20 mb .zap file to recover.

Thank you so much for the help

[scott28tt]

@Thomas_97 

Moderator: Please try and create a thread in the area for the product used - moved to Workstation Pro Discussions

[Thomas_97]

thanks to move into right thread

[a_p_]

You better change the WIndows Explorer settings, i.e. switch to the "Detail" view, and also allow to show file extensions.

Anyway, please run dir *.* /oen >filelist.txt from the command prompt for a complete list of files in the VM's folder. Then compress/zip the filelist.txt along with the VM's .vmx file and attach the .zip archive to your next reply.

André

[Thomas_97]

I hope i done everything you asked.

Ty so much for the support

[a_p_]

Wow, that looks kind of messy. What happened? Did you try to cleanup the VM?
Let's do some cleanup, and collect data to find out what's wrong, and what can be done.

Please follow these steps (if you have a question, please ask):

1. close VMware Workstation
2. create a new sub-directory "Cleanup" in the VM's folder
3. move the following files/folders into the new sub-directory
   caches, *.lck, *.vmss, *.vmem, *.log, as well as all the "dfgshkgrw-tmp" files
4. download the attached .zip archiv, and extract the two scripts into an new/empty folder, then drag&drop the VM's folder on the .cmd batch file. This will extract the metadata (no userdata) from all .vmdk files into Metadata*.bin files.
5. compress/zip all Metadata*.bin files along with "W10E.vmdk", "W10E.vmx", "W10E.vmx~" and attach the .zip archive to your next reply.

André

[Thomas_97]

now the folder is like that.. unfortunatly the .cmd ask me for another 90 gb into the hard disk but i dont have it and i dont have nothing to delete. There is a way to run it into an external HD?

Thanks

[a_p_]

>>> the .cmd ask me for another 90 gb

That's not as it should be. The maximum that I'd expect are several MB (90MB rather than 90GB) for the metadata.
Can you please post a screenshot, or anything else that asks for the 90GB? 

André

[Thomas_97]

can i give u a connection on teamviewer ? maybe was because the drag&drop come from HD to desktop. Now im trying again and when i dra&drop the folder, the cmd open and close instant.

[Thomas_97]

ok solved.

here the data in zip.

[a_p_]

That looks really bad, as if something overwrote the files/headers.

Please use a Hex-Editor (e.g. https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/) to see whether the "dfgshkgrw-tmp" files in the Cleanup directory start with "VMDK" (or reverse "KDVM").

If they do, please drag&drop each of the files individually on the provided .cmd to extract the metadata, and attach the result as a .zip archive to your next reply.

André

[Thomas_97]

Done

[a_p_]

That doesn't look good either.
Do you have an idea what happened. Did you try to e.g. cleanup, or encrypt the VM? Did you have issues with the HDD/SSD on which the files are stored?
What you may try to do - if you are looking to only restore specific files - is to use some data recovery tool, and search in the .vmdk files. Maybe you are lucky.
Other than this, I can offer you to check how much of the metadata has been overwritten, and if it's possible to restore it somehow. If that's what you'd like me to do, then extract the .vmdk file's metadata. You can do this by modifying the line "$HeaderSize = 1536" in my .ps1 script.
For "W10E-s016.vmdk", and "W10E-s022.vmdk" set the value to 65536, for the other  "W10E-s0xx.vmdk" files set it to 524288.

André