Recreating a missing virtual machine disk descriptor file

How to Recreate Missing VMWare Flat Files
If you ever run into a situation where you restart a VMWare virtual machine and lo and behold you get an error that the file cannot be found, and you look, and the vmdk is there but it has a –flat added to it, this blog may help you to recreate a lost virtual disk descriptor file (VMDK).

How to Tell When it’s Time to Recreate Descriptor FilesHow will you know if you need to recreate the descriptor file?  Well you may need to recreate that missing header/descriptor files if:

• The virtual machine disk file listed in the Data store Browser is your virtual machine’s flat file, and does not have an icon.
• When powering on a virtual machine, you see a File not found
• The disk descriptor file for the virtual machine’s disk does not exist or is corrupted.

As always, your first action would be to attempt to restore the missing descriptor file from backups if possible. If this is not possible, you will need to proceed with recreating the virtual machine disk descriptor file.

A Little Background
Each disk drive for a virtual machine consists of a pair of .vmdk files. One is a text file containing descriptive data about the virtual hard disk, and the second is the actual content of that disk.

For example, a virtual machine named testvm has one disk attached to it. This disk is comprised of a testvm.vmdk descriptor file of under 1 KB, and a 10 GB testvm-flat.vmdk flat file which contains virtual machine content.

Overview of the Steps that will be Performed to Recreate the Descriptor File:

• Identify the size of the flat file in bytes.
• Create a new blank virtual disk that is the same size as the original (Critical to assure proper disk geometry.)
  Rename the descriptor file of the newly-created disk to match the name of the original virtual disk.
• Modify the contents of the renamed descriptor file to reference the flat file.
• Remove the leftover temporary flat file of the newly-created disk, as it is not required.
• Now the details.

Detailed Steps:

To create a virtual machine disk:

• Log onto the terminal of the VMWare host using Putty or other terminal emulation software.
• Navigate to the directory that contains the virtual machine disk with the missing descriptor file using the following command: # cd /vmfs/volumes/vmfsvolume/dir
• Identify the type of SCSI controller the virtual disk is using. You can do this by examining the virtual machine configuration file (.vmx). You can download a copy of the .vmx file to your desktop using the data store browser and open using Notepad or similar text editor.
• The controller is identified by the line scsi#.virtualDev , where # is the controller number. There may be more than one controller and controller type attached to the virtual machine, such as lsisas1068 (which is the LSILogic SAS controller), lsilogic, or buslogic. The following example uses lsilogic:present = “true”
  scsi0.sharedBus = “none”
  scsi1.present = “true”
  scsi1.sharedBus = “virtual”
  scsi1.virtualDev = “lsilogic”

• Identify and write down the exact size of the -flat file using the command:# ls -l vmdisk0-flat.vmdk-rw——- 1 root root 4294967296 Aug 11 12:30 vmdisk0-flat.vmdk

You can use vmkfstools command to create a new virtual disk:

# vmkfstools -c 4294967296 -a lsilogic -d thin temp.vmdk

The command uses the following flags:

-c size (this is the size of the virtual disk.)

-a virtual_controller (Whether the virtual disk was configured to work with BusLogic, LSILogic (use for both lsilogic and lsilogic SAS), Paravirtual, or IDE.

HINT: Use lsilogic for virtual disk type “lsilogic” and “lsisas1068”

-d thin (This creates the disk in thin-provisioned format).

HINT: To save disk space, you should create the disk in thin-provisioned format using the flag –d for thin. The resulting flat file then consumes minimal amounts of space (1 MB) instead of immediately assuming the capacity specified with the -c switch. The only consequence to doing this however, is the descriptor file contains an extra line that must be manually removed before turning on the virtual machine.

The temp.vmdk and temp-flat.vmdk files are created as a result.

• Delete temp-flat.vmdk , as it is not needed. You can delete from browser or Run the following command:
• # rm -i temp-flat.vmdk
• Rename temp.vmdk to the name that is required to match the orphaned .flat file (vmdisk0.vmdk, in this example):# mv -i temp.vmdk vmdisk0.vmdk
• Edit the descriptor file using a text editor, you can download to your machine edit and copy it back to the Host, saving the original in case you make a mistake.
• Under the Extent Description section, change the name of the .flat file to match the orphaned .flat file you have. Shown below in red.
• Find and remove the line ddb.thinProvisioned = “1” if the original .vmdk was not a thin disk.
• If it was, retain this line, do not delete. Shown below in red. Make sure you save any changes.
  # Disk DescriptorFile
  version=1
  CID=fb183c20
  parentCID=ffffffff
  createType=”vmfs”# Extent description
  RW 8388608 VMFS “vmdisk0-flat.vmdk”# The Disk Data Base
  #DDBvirtualHWVersion = “4”
  ddb.geometry.cylinders = “522”
  ddb.geometry.heads = “255”
  ddb.geometry.sectors = “63”
  ddb.adapterType = “lsilogic”
  ddb.thinProvisioned = “1”

Upload File Back to Data Store.
The virtual machine is now ready to power on. Verify your changes before starting the virtual machine.

To check the disk chain for consistency, run this command against the disk descriptor file:
# vmkfstools -e filename.vmdk
For a complete chain, you see output similar to:
Disk chain is consistent

For a broken chain, you will see a summary of the snapshot chain and then an output similar to:
Disk chain is not consistent : The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created. The content ID of the parent virtual disk does not match the corresponding parent content ID in the child (18)

Your virtual machine should now be powered up and fully functional.

Graphical View  with Steps

First of all, we start by establishing an SSH connection to the host and browsing to the location of the VMs files:

(rather than delete the newdisk.vmdk for the purposes of this example, I have just renamed it to newdisk.vmdkold – the effect is the same)

Ok, so here we have a bunch of virtual machine files, including the virtual disk (newdisk-flat.vmdk), but no valid newdisk.vmdk file to go with it. To start we need to examine the .vmx file to see what type of scsi controller the disk was using, as we will need that information to recreate the descriptor file. Looking at the .vmx file, we can see the following:

We can see from the scsi0.virtualDev line that the disk is using the lsilogic controller. The next piece of information that we need is the exact size of the virtual disk file. We can get this by running ‘ls -l newdisk-flat.vmdk‘:

Armed with the scsi controller type and the disk size, we can now use vmkfstools to create a new disk and descriptor file by running ‘vmkfstools -c 4294967296 -a lsilogic -d thin temp.vmdk‘.

As a result of running that command two new files have been created – temp.vmdk and temp-flat.vmdk. We’re only interested in the descriptor file, so we can delete the disk file by running ‘rm temp-flat.vmdk‘.

The next step is to rename temp.vmdk to newdisk.vmdk, in order for it to match our original disk. We can do this by running ‘mv temp.vmdk newdisk.vmdk‘.

The final part of the process is to edit the newly created newdisk.vmdk file. When we first open the file it looks like this:

We need to change the line referencing the flat vmdk file as follows:

We should now be able to power on the virtual machine!