How To TRY and Repair a VMware VMDK File John Doe had a vmdk-crash and would like to provide some information and instruction about vmdk-repair here: The basic repair attempt is always done by your VMware Server during startup of the virtual machine. VMware checks the disks and if there are some inconsistencies which can be done by a basic repair VMware will do this. If there are severe errors in vmdk-file, VMware won't mount the disk, VMware provides NO tool like "chckdsk" or "vrepair" etc. So, what to do ? 1.) Consider a restore from your backup. 2) Install the vmware diskmount utility on a windows machine, make available the corrupted vmdk-file to the windows machine and try to mount the disk. (http://www.vmware.com/download/diskmount.html) How to? Install the driver using the installer. Change to the directory where you installed it. Syntax: vmware-mount /p This shows the partitions/volumes within the vmdk.file. Determine which partition to mount. Call this partition "N" vmware-mount /v:N R: <diskfile> Substitute N with the partition number determined in the step before. <diskfile> has to be substituted by the vmdk-file. This may be a local or a network drive. I think, accessing the vmdk-file through a local drive is the safest way. In this case, the disk will be mounted as drive R: 3) If the vmware diskmount utility does not mount the vmdk try Ken Katos virtual disk driver: http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/ How to ? Install the driver using the installer. Change to the directory where you installed it. Syntax: vdk start vdk open 0 <diskfile> /L:R: <diskfile> has to be substituted by the vmdk-file. /L:R: says: mount it as drive R: 4) If you succeed mounting the vmdk-file copy the data to a new virtual disk. Use e.x. robocopy for this. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx? FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en Links: http://www.vmware.com/download/diskmount.html http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/