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I was running a virtual machine in VMware Fusion 11 when my computer crashed. When I tried to start it up again I saw an error message informing me that "The disk has one or more internal errors that cannot be fixed."

Is there a way I can fix this?

waspinator
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2 Answers2

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Try using vmware-vdiskmanager to repair the image.

Since VMware already likely tried running this command on its own, this probably will not help, but it's the easiest thing to try.

On macOS with VMware Fusion open terminal and change directory to /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library

./vmware-vdiskmanager -R /path/to/your_corrupted_disk.vmdk

If you get a message saying that The virtual disk, '/path/to/your_corrupted_disk.vmdk', is corrupted and cannot be repaired. Try using StarWind V2V Converter on Windows to repair the disk.

  1. Download StarWind V2V Converter from https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-v2v-converter, and install it on a Windows PC.
  2. Make a copy of your_corrupted_disk.vmdk along with all related .vmdks. (your_corrupted_disk-s001.vmdk, your_corrupted_disk-s002.vmdk, ...). Best to copy the whole parent directory.
  3. Use StarWind to convert it from a local vmdk to a local vmdk. It will flatten all your "*.vmdk" files into a single file
  4. Create a new virtual machine and select to "use an existing virtual disk" and point it to the fixed version.
waspinator
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VMDK of one of my VMs got corrupted after my phisiscal disk got overfilled and the VM got terminated.

I tried several methods including vmware-vdiskmanager and StarWind V2V Converter, but none of them was able to recover the file.

Eventually I was able fix it using DiskInternals VMFS Recovery.

Here what I did:

  1. Download and install trial version of the VMFS Recovery: https://www.diskinternals.com/vmfs-recovery/

  2. Launch the program and skip the wizard

  3. Select Drives > Mount image, mount the corrupted VMDK

  4. Find the mounted image in the list, right-click it (choose the parent element that says VMware disk (vmdk), not the indiviual partition) and select Create image

  5. Chose the path to save the image, keep all the settings default, click Save

Wait for the process to complete. If there will be no errors, it's a good sign.

Note that the image will be saved in RAW format, and to convert it back to VMDK you would need to use VBoxManage which is part of VirtualBox.

Thus, install VirtualBox if you don't have it already, then to convert RAW disk to VMDK use the command:

VBoxManage convertfromraw "C:\Source.dsk" "C:\destination.vmdk" --format VMDK

Now try to mount the resulting VMDK to the VM, hopefully it will work.

Lulu
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