Restore Vmdk Descriptor File [patched] -

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.”

Don't panic. You don't need backups of the entire VM to fix this. You just need to rebuild a 1KB text file.

Have you recovered a VM using this method? Let me know in the comments below! restore vmdk descriptor file

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

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. We’ve all been there

Create a new file named exactly like the original (e.g., WindowsServer.vmdk ) using vi or nano .

Disaster Recovery: How to Manually Restore a Corrupt or Missing VMDK Descriptor File You just need to rebuild a 1KB text file

ls -la *.vmdk stat vmname-flat.vmdk You need the . Write this number down.