Hello all,
I recently had a serious issue when my virtual machine failed all of a sudden and I lost some 2000 of my mails from one day to the next. I tried desperately over the weekend, and though there were quite a few online KB forums, I could not exactly figure out how to recover the PST files that were blocked inside the Virtual Machine drive. While I was doing my web research on how to recover, seeing the complexity of achieving this, I promised myself that if I am able to successfully recover the data, I would create a blog for the benefit of the "not so technical" users like me to benefit from the knowledge that I could accumulate. So here we go,
Before we start with the recovery, let us understand the issue that I had.
1. I am a Mac user and a proud owner of a Macbook Pro late 2011 edition. I keep updating any new software that comes my way and so naturally, I run the latest Snow Leopard OS.
2. For my work, I need some tools which are only accessible via Internet Explorer. (Though I work for one of the largest IT service providers, our developers still create internal company portals with only IE compatibility!! I will leave that frustrated discussion to a different blog)
3. I had read online about running Windows on a Mac and ended up getting VMWare Fusion. I downloaded the latest version, 5.x of Fusion and installed it on my Mac.
4. I already had a Windows 7 premium edition on a disk and so installed that as my base operating system. The set up was smooth and fine and my windows machine booted up perfectly and things worked exactly as they were supposed to.
5. I then upgraded my windows 7 to Windows 8. All went well. No issues there as well.
6. I installed outlook 2007 on the machine and configured my official mail account in that and everything was smooth and fine.
7. There is a fantastic option in VMWare Fusion, which lets you see and work with your Mac machine directly. In the sense, you can have all the desktop items that you see on Mac on your Windows desktop directly and a very seamless integration between the two operating systems. This makes your life super easy, since moving files from one OS to the other has never been easier. Also, this was a life saver for me since none of the files that I worked with on my windows machine were saved locally. They were all saved in the desktop which was accessible in the Mac.
The problem:
All went smooth and fine, until one fine day, my Mac was out of the power port and my VM machine was running. Due to my power setting, the Mac went to sleep with the VM machine in powered on state. I woke the Mac up a couple of times and went back to sleep again. This for some reason corrupted my virtual machine. It went in to an infinite loop of restarts and recovery. It ended up indicating clearly that the .VMDK file which is the main hard disc file for the VM was corrupted and that it could not be mounted. While, there are loads of ways in which you can attempt a repair, it does not really recover the data. Based on the literally hundreds of detailed KB articles spread around in the internet world about this type of issue, I attempted to repair the file in the Terminal window with some commands, but nothing worked. I had a 67 GB VMDK file which could not even be copied from its home directory on to the desktop. Every attempt to clone it or copy it failed once it reached about 4GB completion. Clearly the issue was not being addressed.
The Solution:
The most important realisation was that the Mac OS was not equipped to handle the corruption of the VMDK file which contained the Windows OS, with its NTFS file system.
The only possible way (that worked for me!!) to recover the data is by mounting this VMDK file as an independent hard disk in a new VM ware environment. Let me try to explain this in a bit more detail.
Things you need:
1. Original Windows OS disc (Can be Vista, Windows 7 or any other with a NTFS file system type - If your VMDK file has the same file system that is..)
2. VM Ware Fusion (If you are reading up to here, you probably already have it installed)
3. Location of your corrupt VMDK file.
4. About 1 Hour of your time.
Steps:
1. Close all VM ware related applications. All mounters etc etc
2. Open VM Ware Fusion
3. Create a new operating system entry
4. Install a new operating System once you allocate the hard disc space, the RAM capacity etc.
5. Install any Windows OS, preferably Vista or 7
6. I had the Windows Vista disc available, so installed Vista on the machine
7. It took about 30 Minutes to complete the installation
8. Boot the virtual machine with your new operating system.
9. Once all basic tools installation etc are complete, completely shut down the Windows OS
10. Now, go to the VM ware library window.
11. Select the current Vista VM machine.
12. Right click on it and select settings
13. Double Click on the Hard disc
14. Click on Add device.
15. Click on Existing hard disk
16. A pop would open. Navigate to the location where your corrupt VMDK file is located
17. Select any option from the 3 options that pop up on screen. I selected the "Take this disc away from the current virtual machine that is using it". Since I didnt have any virtual machine using that disc, it did not matter
18. The disc gets loaded and once complete, click on the APPLY button.
19. Close the settings
20. Power up the Vista virtual machine
21. Now, when the boot happens, there must a error indication about the newly added hard disk. The system would request for a data and consistency check. This is basically the CHKDSK functionality of Windows which checks the HD.
22. It runs the CHKDSK and clears of the issues.
23. Once complete, the system boots in Vista(or whatever you have installed) with this corrupt hard disc as an additional drive.
24. You can access this hard disc and copy and save all the important data that you need.
25. Once you are complete, you can remove this hard disc from the virtual machine in the same way that you added it. Just use the Remove option this time around
Thats it!! You have recovered your data from a corrupt VMDK file. I spent my entire weekend, frustrated and unsuccessful, but finally managed to recover the data in the end. So if any of you have a corrupt VMDK file issue, please try the above method. Good luck.
Cheers
Vignesh
I recently had a serious issue when my virtual machine failed all of a sudden and I lost some 2000 of my mails from one day to the next. I tried desperately over the weekend, and though there were quite a few online KB forums, I could not exactly figure out how to recover the PST files that were blocked inside the Virtual Machine drive. While I was doing my web research on how to recover, seeing the complexity of achieving this, I promised myself that if I am able to successfully recover the data, I would create a blog for the benefit of the "not so technical" users like me to benefit from the knowledge that I could accumulate. So here we go,
Before we start with the recovery, let us understand the issue that I had.
1. I am a Mac user and a proud owner of a Macbook Pro late 2011 edition. I keep updating any new software that comes my way and so naturally, I run the latest Snow Leopard OS.
2. For my work, I need some tools which are only accessible via Internet Explorer. (Though I work for one of the largest IT service providers, our developers still create internal company portals with only IE compatibility!! I will leave that frustrated discussion to a different blog)
3. I had read online about running Windows on a Mac and ended up getting VMWare Fusion. I downloaded the latest version, 5.x of Fusion and installed it on my Mac.
4. I already had a Windows 7 premium edition on a disk and so installed that as my base operating system. The set up was smooth and fine and my windows machine booted up perfectly and things worked exactly as they were supposed to.
5. I then upgraded my windows 7 to Windows 8. All went well. No issues there as well.
6. I installed outlook 2007 on the machine and configured my official mail account in that and everything was smooth and fine.
7. There is a fantastic option in VMWare Fusion, which lets you see and work with your Mac machine directly. In the sense, you can have all the desktop items that you see on Mac on your Windows desktop directly and a very seamless integration between the two operating systems. This makes your life super easy, since moving files from one OS to the other has never been easier. Also, this was a life saver for me since none of the files that I worked with on my windows machine were saved locally. They were all saved in the desktop which was accessible in the Mac.
The problem:
All went smooth and fine, until one fine day, my Mac was out of the power port and my VM machine was running. Due to my power setting, the Mac went to sleep with the VM machine in powered on state. I woke the Mac up a couple of times and went back to sleep again. This for some reason corrupted my virtual machine. It went in to an infinite loop of restarts and recovery. It ended up indicating clearly that the .VMDK file which is the main hard disc file for the VM was corrupted and that it could not be mounted. While, there are loads of ways in which you can attempt a repair, it does not really recover the data. Based on the literally hundreds of detailed KB articles spread around in the internet world about this type of issue, I attempted to repair the file in the Terminal window with some commands, but nothing worked. I had a 67 GB VMDK file which could not even be copied from its home directory on to the desktop. Every attempt to clone it or copy it failed once it reached about 4GB completion. Clearly the issue was not being addressed.
The Solution:
The most important realisation was that the Mac OS was not equipped to handle the corruption of the VMDK file which contained the Windows OS, with its NTFS file system.
The only possible way (that worked for me!!) to recover the data is by mounting this VMDK file as an independent hard disk in a new VM ware environment. Let me try to explain this in a bit more detail.
Things you need:
1. Original Windows OS disc (Can be Vista, Windows 7 or any other with a NTFS file system type - If your VMDK file has the same file system that is..)
2. VM Ware Fusion (If you are reading up to here, you probably already have it installed)
3. Location of your corrupt VMDK file.
4. About 1 Hour of your time.
Steps:
1. Close all VM ware related applications. All mounters etc etc
2. Open VM Ware Fusion
3. Create a new operating system entry
4. Install a new operating System once you allocate the hard disc space, the RAM capacity etc.
5. Install any Windows OS, preferably Vista or 7
6. I had the Windows Vista disc available, so installed Vista on the machine
7. It took about 30 Minutes to complete the installation
8. Boot the virtual machine with your new operating system.
9. Once all basic tools installation etc are complete, completely shut down the Windows OS
10. Now, go to the VM ware library window.
11. Select the current Vista VM machine.
12. Right click on it and select settings
13. Double Click on the Hard disc
14. Click on Add device.
15. Click on Existing hard disk
16. A pop would open. Navigate to the location where your corrupt VMDK file is located
17. Select any option from the 3 options that pop up on screen. I selected the "Take this disc away from the current virtual machine that is using it". Since I didnt have any virtual machine using that disc, it did not matter
18. The disc gets loaded and once complete, click on the APPLY button.
19. Close the settings
20. Power up the Vista virtual machine
21. Now, when the boot happens, there must a error indication about the newly added hard disk. The system would request for a data and consistency check. This is basically the CHKDSK functionality of Windows which checks the HD.
22. It runs the CHKDSK and clears of the issues.
23. Once complete, the system boots in Vista(or whatever you have installed) with this corrupt hard disc as an additional drive.
24. You can access this hard disc and copy and save all the important data that you need.
25. Once you are complete, you can remove this hard disc from the virtual machine in the same way that you added it. Just use the Remove option this time around
Thats it!! You have recovered your data from a corrupt VMDK file. I spent my entire weekend, frustrated and unsuccessful, but finally managed to recover the data in the end. So if any of you have a corrupt VMDK file issue, please try the above method. Good luck.
Cheers
Vignesh
