Recovering / accessing a broken VDI / VMDK

[ChipMcK]

Well get of your backside and write one or find one
But seriously as a linux user you could have a small xp VM handy with these tools and load the broken VM via a shared folder.
The really serious point here is that there are many many many VM's out there and near enough nothing to fix them when they go south. Paragon apparently has 'something' but it ain't cheap and no track record on usefulness.

One important item: VirtualBox or VMware would need to be installed in the windows vm for these "recovery" programs

[Brutalizer]

My Win7 VM did not boot, so to retrieve my data I mounted the VM in Linux as a storage, using... qemu? Then I could cd into the new folder which contained the VM and extract all data I needed. Then I recreated the VM and copied back the data. I could not repair the VM, I just extracted the documents I needed.

[mpack]

That will only work if the disk is still usable in VirtualBox or in whatever other platform you choose. I.e. it will only work if the headers and blockmap are intact, i.e. not really a broken disk at all.

And if I was you I would check that the extracted file contents are as they should be. There are some ancient and truly dumb disk imaging tools out there, many of which will not understand the dynamic VDI format, they will assume that VDI blocks are in linear order. This will tend to work for navigating the filesystem indices (because the filesystem sectors were laid down immediately the drive was formatted), so it will appear to be working great - but the file content will be grabbed from effectively random parts of the disk surface.

[mpack]

I'm going to lock and un-pin this topic. It was only ever one ex-mod's flight of fancy, it was never useful.