Introduction If you’ve worked with VMware virtual machines, you may have encountered two files: vmname.vmdk (a small descriptor file) and vmname-flat.vmdk (the actual raw data). If the descriptor file is deleted, corrupted, or missing, your virtual machine won’t boot or be recognized by VMware products—even though your data is perfectly safe inside the -flat.vmdk file.
# Disk DescriptorFile version=1 CID=12345678 parentCID=ffffffff createType="twoGbMaxExtentSparse" RW 4194304 VMFS "MyVM-flat.vmdk" The Disk Data Base #DDB how to recover vmdk from flat file
For quick recovery, try vmware-vdiskmanager -R . For manual control, edit the descriptor file yourself. Either way, your VM can live again. how to recover vmdk from flat file
ddb.adapterType = "ide" ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383" ddb.geometry.heads = "16" ddb.geometry.sectors = "63" ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4" how to recover vmdk from flat file