And Dave? He called her later that week: “You restored from a delta? I didn’t think that was possible without losing data.”
# Inside FinServe-07-000014.vmdk descriptor: RW 83886080 VMFS "FinServe-07-000014-delta.vmdk" parentFileNameHint="FinServe-07-000013.vmdk" Instead of committing (which would try to write 2.3 TB to the base and likely fail due to space), she used vmkfstools -i to clone the entire chain into a new, consolidated thin VMDK while the VM was off . This forces VMware to read every delta in order and write a fresh, clean VMDK. restore vmware from delta vmdk
She had to restore from the delta —not the base. And Dave
She used vmkfstools -D to inspect each delta. The deepest child ( FinServe-07-000014.vmdk ) had a valid descriptor but the parent CID didn’t match any actual parent. A typical "broken chain" from a storage migration gone wrong months ago. This forces VMware to read every delta in