Cannot start VM - Missing Snapshot

[Ryan210]

Hello,

First off, my apologies for not using VMWare much, most of my experience has been with Hyper-V.

I'm having an issue with a VM on ESXi v5.5, and working on a vSphere Client. The VM is stored on a SAN and it accidentally rebooted which caused me to lose a snapshot file. When I attempt to start the VM I get this error:

Message from SERVER.DOMAIN.local:

"The operation on file "/vmfs/volumes/522215df-dd8877b4-1782-ac162da625e0/Filesystems/SERVER/DISK1-000001-delta.vmdk" failed. If the file resides on a remote file system, make sure that the network connection and the server where this disk resides are functioning properly. If the file resides on removable media, reattach the media. Select button.retry to attempt the operation again. Select button.abort to end this session. Select button.cont to forward the error to the guest operating system."

The snapshot file is not important, I just am looking for how to have the VM boot up without using it. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Ryan

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

in order to find out what can be done, it is necessary to have a clear picture of the current situation.

Please enable SSH on the host, and use e.g. putty to connect to it. Then run ls -lisa in the VM's folder, and paste the output to a reply post. It would also help if you'd compress/zip the VM's configuration (.vmx) file along with all of its vmware*.log files, and attach the resulting .zip archive to the reply post too.

André

[Ryan210 · Accepted solution]

I figured it out. What I did was edit the VMX file to not reference the missing VMDK file by finding the entry in the VMX file and changing it from "DISK1-000001.vmdk" to "DISK1.vmdk". I then renamed the "...ctk.vmdk" files to have them be recreated on startup.

The VM has booted up fine and I no longer get any errors.

[continuum]

For anybody reading this  with the same problem ....
This is no solution to the problem and it comes with a high price.
Rewriting the vmx-file will result in a loss of data.
The data-loss can be minimal (if the missing delta file was small) - but it can also be quite large if the snapshot was in use for several months.