Urgent - Cannot Power on VMDK

[mbeylis]

Good Day

I was in the process of copy some files to my Virtual Disk when it gave an IO error and crashed

When I try to start it now I get the following error

The operation on file "E:\VM\BuildMachine.vmdk" failed.

If the file resides on a remote file system, make sure that the network connection and the server where this disk resides are functioning properly. If the file resides on removable media, reattach the media.

I have also attached the error log

I see errors like:

FILE: FileCreateDirectoryRetry: Non-retriable error encountered (C:\ProgramData\VMware): Cannot create a file when that file already exists (183)

[msg.dictionary.load.openFailed] Cannot open file "C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini": The system cannot find the file specified.

ConfigDB: Failed to load C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini

Please help

Mark

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

an I/O error might be related to the hardware, i.e. an issue with the local HDD.

Did you already check the disk (e.g. running chkdsk e: /f), and/or try to copy the .vmdk file to another disk to find out whether this also throws an I/O error?

André

[mbeylis]

Hi, Thanks for the welcome

I rebooted my machine to see if that would help, no joy

I tried to copy the physical VM folder to an external disk to try elsewhere but I get an I/O error then so am unable to copy the folder

Mark

[a_p_]

Try to contact continuum‌, he might be able to help (see his profile for contact details).

André

[mbeylis]

Hi

This is time critcal so I bought a license to SysTools VMware Recovery and extracted all my files and placed them into a newly created VM

Would still like to know what went wrong with the original VM though

Mark

[a_p_]

I don't think this is/was an issue with the VM per se. Since you were also not able to copy the VM's files, it looks like the physical HDD on which the VM is stored has errors, i.e. the writes to the VM caused the .vmdk file to grow, and the physical disk space used for the increment is defective.

André