This is probably one of the worst disasters in a VM environment. One of the VM's was deleted from disk by mistake. Instead of being removed from inventory, the entire folder containing the VMDK was deleted from VMFS.
My intention was to free up some space in the datastore by shrinking some VM's which are no longer in use. It turned out that one of the active one was chosen inadvertently. Here is the steps I have taken during the incident:
1. Shrank all partitions on the VM machines.
2. Ran VM converter to "create" a new VM (V2V) with reduced disk sizes in thin provisioning.
3. Shut down the original VM and delete it from disk.
A few hours later, I realized that the deleted VM actually has a live database. I quickly powered up the shrunk version. While the OS appeared to be operational, drive 😧 and E: (set up as a second HDD) were showing as RAW. Unfortunately, these two partitions contained the database and data files.
I tried some utilities but was unable to convert the RAW drives to NTFS. Is there any way to recover the original VM files? Any chance that I can recover the data?
Esxi Version : 6.5
VM OS: Windows Server 2016
