Comments on: Howto: Recreate VMDK files

By: Ton

Ton — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:12:50 +0000

I meant Zack offcourse

Ton: Thanks Salvatore, your trick did it, smooth and easy, Thanks all for your help, i thought i had destroyed a lot of data of one of my customers !

By: Ton

Ton — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:11:32 +0000

Thanks Salvatore, your trick did it, smooth and easy, Thanks all for your help, i thought i had destroyed a lot of data of one of my customers !

Salvatore: Great!! This was the trick that fixed my issue :-)

By: Georges

Georges — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:52:12 +0000

Same as Kody (@Kody do u have solved your datas ?)
I’ve just delete my 4 vmdk by choosing this “Delete from disk” function.
Does anyone have any tricky solution for me ?
I don’t shut down the ESXi4 yet.

The 4 vmdk were store in a whole HDD. (just in case )

Thanks any way:)

By: Steve Reynolds

Steve Reynolds — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:09:36 +0000

There is a little easier way to do this with a slight change.

1. Remove the VM from inventory if it is still in the list.
2. Rename the VM Datastore folder to a new name.
3. Recreate the VM with Disks of the same size and Name of the original missing VM.
4. Once that is done go into the datastore and Move the two Flat.vmdk files into the folder of the new VM. It will warn you that it already exists. Just tell it to overwrite the files.
5. Power the VM back on and you are good to go.

This worked for me last night before I saw this article, so I thought I would share. It doesn’t require you to go in and edit the metadata file.

By: Will

Will — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:36:12 +0000

Saved me a call to Vmware tech support… Cheers

By: bizarro stormy

bizarro stormy — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:11:46 +0000

It worked! Thank you very very much.

By: Nocte

Nocte — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:30:02 +0000

Thank you so much !

This article works also for esx 4 too (Before I found this howto, I used datastore browser to copy/paste the flat vmdk, but VM don’t start… Command line is really needed, or I missed something).

By: adastra

adastra — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:52:37 +0000

hi
very nice article, mutch thx.
But is there a way to recover a deleted snapshot too?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:23:39 +0000

Worked perfectly thank you!

By: Millman

Millman — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:28:26 +0000

Worked like a charm! Only thing I also removed were the Delta and Snapshot files.
But I think nothing was changed on the machine so I was lucky!

Tried to remove the snapshots via the Snapshot manager but that didn’t work.
Had to remove the machine from inventory and add it again.
(double-clicked vmx file in datastore folder)

Thanks for explaining!