OK, so one of my clients came into their office today to a nightmare. I will entail the setup and then elaborate on the issue:
Dell Optiplex 990
i5-2400 (3.1GHz Quad)
8GB RAM
120GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD
Win 7 Professional 64-Bit
VMware Workstation 10 w/ Server 2008 R2 64-Bit VM (which starts automatically upon PC boot via script) being used for:
• ACT! Contact Database Server
• Quickbooks Database Server
• Housing DATA being served by the above softwares
The VM INTERNAL DATA is being backed up to an external HDD and also to Carbonite nightly.
Here's the issue:
This morning, the client states that Win7 loads up but the VMware session has an error.
I remoted into the machine and see that the VM session indeed has a strange error. It's basically saying that it can't find the files necessary to start the session.
I browse to the area where those files should be and the actual Disk Image (.VMDK) file is there...all 75GB of it. But the .vmx and other associated files are nowhere to be found.
I looked in recycle bin, searched local SSD, etc and cannot find them. Not sure where they went, but that was hours ago. The VM files were NOT being backed up. Forum browsing led me to believe that it might be a possibility to "create a new VM" and then "add the existing disk" to the VM and that would create the necessary files. When I try to do that, I get a "the file specified is not a virtual disk" error. Upon further research, I'm understanding that this may be caused by the fact that there is no "Header/Descriptor" file. Again, not sure how/when/why they're gone, but believe me, they're gone. So, I've been reading some entries saying that I could use ESXI to "recreate a header/descriptor file" but I 1)don't have ESXI and 2) have no idea how to use it etc. Is there anything else I could be doing to try to remedy this? The VMDK seems to be intact (75GB) but from what I understand, it's just a "content file" and the descriptor/header file basically tell VMware "what type of HDD it's supposed to be, size, etc".
PLEASE HELP!!!!!!