VMFS Recovery Question

[mrtba]

Good morning,

I hope this is the correct area to post this question.

I'm trying to recover a VMFS volume on one of our ESXi boxes as someone accidently deleted a VM that wasn't backed up.

I'm attempting to use the VMFS open source driver.  However I think I've hit a snag.  I have created the .dd file so I have the image file but I cannot get that open source driver to mount the image.  when I do I get "This file has no allocation table" error.  Could this be that the tool only supports VMFS version 3 and I'm running version 5?  the image file is exactly 2TB.  So I'm thinking that might be an issue as well.  I've mounted the image using a free mounting utility in windows called OSFMount but that just tells me the driver is not formatted.  Which is expected as that is a VMFS volume and windows wouldn't know how to read it.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Tim

[cykVM]

Hi,

maybe this is of any help: http://woshub.com/how-to-access-vmfs-datastore-from-linux-windows/

and here you find another discussion about that topic: Re: Recover Deleted VM From VMFS5?

I would in general prefer Linux to Windows for recovery. Here is a solution within a bootable LiveCD from a german guy: Mightycare veröffentlicht erste Desaster Recovery LiveCD für VMware vSphere 5 Volumes | Mightycare vBlog

(details in English: scroll down that page a bit)

Hope that helps

cykVM