The VMDK file on one of our VMs was accidently deleted via the command line on the ESX host. This wasn't the boot parotion, but a data D: drive.
The data drive VMDK actually resides on a LUN. Is there anyway to recover? The LUN shows 100% free space. But I would think the actual raw data is still there. We have a backup, but it is several months old. LOL
Thanks!
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Sorry to say that you're out of luck. There is no 'undelete' functionality in the VMware tools, and I don't believe there are any undelete tools out there that understand the VMFS file system. You'll need to recover from a backup.
On the other hand, VMware support *may* have a tool. It's worth logging a call and asking the question.
Glad to hear that you could get the data back. I'm impressed that Ontrack succeeded.
Probably a good time to set up AD authentication on your ESX servers and turn off root login from ssh. A non-root user would not have been able to delete the vmdk file without using sudo or 'su -' first. Also make sure that rm is aliased to 'rm -i'.
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/
I've experienced a similar case. My ESX4.0 told me, after a reboot, that my disk had no VMFS ?!? I couldn't find any data on the disk. There was a partition but no data/fs. It was not that hard to use a undelete/filerecovery application to do a block by block search on the disk and it found all my NTFS partitions and at least all my essential files... Didn't try to restore everything since i didn't know how to make the restored partitions bootable.
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by: SysExpertPosted on 2007-03-12 at 12:22:32ID: 18704925
I gues you would need an undelete program.
Plenty are available, but you need to be very carefull, since you would prefer one that will NOT write to the data partition, but preferably somewhere else.
I hope this helps !