[ale] File recovery

[Jim Kinney]

Excellent! That may save an svn repo
On Jan 6, 2014 10:31 AM, "Ed Cashin" <ecashin at noserose.net> wrote:

> Well, if you're lucky enough that the new install is smaller than the
> old one, and the VM disk images happened to be past the point that the
> new install wrote on the disk, and if you're lucky enough for the VM
> images to be physically contiguous on the disk (thick provisioning
> would probably make that the case), then you could scan for the magic
> number of the VMware image in the block device itself and find the
> beginnings of the images.  There's probably some metadata in the disk
> image header that will tell you the size to copy out to a new file.
>
> Yes, Googling for VMware disk image magic found PDFs that have details
> about reading the metadata.  I don't know if this link
> (http://www.vmware.com/app/vmdk/?src=vmdk) will work for you, but the
> vmdk_specs.pdf says,
>
>   magicNumber is initialized with
>
>   #define SPARSE_MAGICNUMBER 0x564d444b /* 'V' 'M' 'D' 'K' */
>
> ... and it has info on interpreting that particular version of the
> disk image format.
>
> Good luck.
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 3:46 PM, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu> wrote:
> > Oh, ouch.  If it zapped all the partitions and installed over, I don't
> think there is going to be any way to recover.
> >
> > --
> > Allen Beddingfield
> > Systems Engineer
> > The University of Alabama
> > ________________________________
> > From: ale-bounces at ale.org [ale-bounces at ale.org] on behalf of Jim Kinney
> [jim.kinney at gmail.com]
> > Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 2:35 PM
> > To: Atlanta User Group (E-mail)
> > Subject: Re: [ale] File recovery
> >
> >
> > VM were not on backup. Local snapshots were on disk. Supposed to be demo
> and testbed stuff but apparently not all was disposable.
> >
> > On Jan 5, 2014 2:51 PM, "Beddingfield, Allen" <allen at ua.edu<mailto:
> allen at ua.edu>> wrote:
> > What type of backups do you have? Whole VM backups or file level? I
> assume they were on a datastore on local disk?
> >
> >
> > From: Jim Kinney [mailto:jim.kinney at gmail.com<mailto:
> jim.kinney at gmail.com>]
> > Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 01:12 PM Central Standard Time
> > To: Atlanta User Group (E-mail) <ale at ale.org<mailto:ale at ale.org>>
> > Subject: [ale] File recovery
> >
> >
> > Haven't had to do this in a while so I'm looking for ideas.
> >
> > VMware ESX host rebooted. The bios was set to pxeboot. The pxeboot
> process it picked up installed Fedora19 over the ESX.
> >
> > sigh
> >
> > Looking for recommendations for tool chains for VM recovery. I'm not
> expecting much success but trying to balance reconstruct time vs recovery
> time.
> >
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> >
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>
>
> --
>   Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>
>   http://noserose.net/e/
>   http://www.coraid.com/
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