A friend of mine runs ESX and to store the VMs he uses Starwind on a Windows-server.
Recently he accidentally assigned the wrong local volume in Starwind. Instead of pointing to the disk with VMFS he pointed to a NTFS disk with 1 Tb of important data.
He started the ESX which found no storage - he run a rescan on iSCSI but found nothing.
He then noticed his mistake. Too bad the Windows-server no longer detected the disk. The NTFS-volume was gone and the disk looked like a raw unpartitioned blank disk.
He then send that disk via mail to me so that I have a look.
It really appeared to be blank.
I then used testdisk - see http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
It detected the disk as upartitioned raw disk of 1 Tb.
I run the "scan for lost partitions"
testdisk found the volume and offered to fix it.
Two minutes later everything was fine - data is back unharmed.
Maybe it helps someone ...
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VMX-parameters- VMware-liveCD - VM-Sickbay
Thanks for the great tips Continuum, as always you're life saver to disk corruptions!
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Regards,
Stefan Nguyen
VMware vExpert 2009
iGeek Systems Inc.
VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant
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