Corrupt VMDK & cannot download to local machine

[Bent0]

Hi,

I've been pulling my hair out for the past few days. I'm renting a dedicated server which runs ESXi 4.1. I have a few VM's on it but the faulty one is a Windows SBS 2011 server which runs Exchange. This is my personal Exchange server and I haven;t been monitoring it frequently. Turns out my back-ups are useless....

The physical server suffered from alot of power outages in the past few days which caused the disks to be messed up. The other VM's i've been able to salvage (Ubuntu) but my main concern is this SBS 2011 server as it hosts all of my e-mail.

I cannot boot it anymore, It's super slow and takes more than a hour to boot into safe mode. I tried downloading the VMDK to my computer using vSphere but this fails at about 50%. I also tried WinSCP and FastSCP 3.0 but those also fail after about 40 of the 85 GB's.

The error FastSCP returned:

I really need this VM to boot up or be able to restore the Exchange database. All suggestions are more than welcome! :-)

[Sree]

Hi,

1)Have you tried creating a new Vm and tried to attach the vmdk(To isolate issue is specific to guest).If it's still taking lot of time to boot,we need to trouble shoot from guest perspective.

2)Tried to attach the vdmk to any other virtual machine(Same Configuration),if the vmdk is getting detected ,please move forward with the backup .

[Bent0]

Will try that now. I tried installing a new Windows install previously but that went horribly slow because of the messed up disks.

[memaad]

Hi,

You are not able to download vmdk becasue of network interruption.

Regards

Mohammed

[Bent0]

Well even in maintenance mode and on a stable 100 mbit connection I couldn't manage to download the VMDK.

What I ended up doing was booting the VM with a Ubuntu Live CD and then I dragged the EDB files out and restored them on a new shiny SBS 2011 server.

Alot more work but at least no data loss :-)