Restore Vmdk Descriptor File (SIMPLE)

You check the datastore, and everything looks fine—your large flat VMDK (usually named vmname-flat.vmdk ) is sitting right there, taking up 100GB. But its tiny sibling, the descriptor file ( vmname.vmdk ), is missing or corrupted.

vi WindowsServer.vmdk Here is a standard template for a monolithic sparse or monolithic flat disk. You must change the values in brackets. restore vmdk descriptor file

Don't panic. You don't need backups of the entire VM to fix this. You just need to rebuild a 1KB text file. You check the datastore, and everything looks fine—your

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic" ddb.geometry.cylinders = "[CYLINDERS]" ddb.geometry.heads = "255" ddb.geometry.sectors = "63" ddb.longContentID = "b5e0dbe93277d7e7d70505c1" ddb.thinProvisioned = "0" ddb.toolsVersion = "0" ddb.uuid = "6000C299-1234-5678-9abc-def123456789" ddb.virtualHWVersion = "13" You must change the values in brackets

We’ve all been there. You go to power on a virtual machine, and instead of a familiar boot screen, you’re greeted by an error: “Failed to open disk: The file specified is not a virtual disk.”

Always take a checksum (MD5) of the -flat.vmdk before editing. One wrong space in the descriptor file is fine—it will throw an error. One wrong offset? That corrupts the partition table.