I have 2 VMDK files of an old virtual machine that I deleted and I kept only the virtual disks. Now I had created a new virtual machine and tried to access the 2 Virtual drives, But actually, these files are not recognised as a file. But I realised that these VMDK files contain my important valuable data. Can anyone tell me how can I recover data from the VMDK file? Help would be really appreciated. Thanks In advance!

If the above query seems to be familiar with you and if also the user facing the VMDK file not recognized as a virtual disk issue then you are at the right place. I will suggest you read the entire article and learn how to recover your valuable data items from VMDK files.

What is Virtualisation

Virtualisation is a process of creating a Virtual version of something. It can be of various types such as hardware virtualisation, software virtualisation, operating system virtualisation, server virtualisation. With the help of operating system virtualisation, the user can run multiple operating systems on the host computer. And the data of the virtual machines Vmware are stored in the Virtual machine disk file (.vmdk ) file. If any of the corruption occurs in VMDK file then the user can face Vmware VMDK file not recognized issue.

How to Resolve VMDK File Not Recognized as a Virtual Disk Problem

The user has to copy VMDK file of the source to one of the data stores in ESX server. After copying virtual machine disk file to datastores. The user can go the command line and use the following command

cd/vmfs/volumes/datastore name
vmkstools -i< input >< output >-d for example-vmkfstools -i vm1.vmdk vm1.vmdk-d thin
Once completed the user can use this disk in VM

Note – If the above manual method to solve VMDK file not recognized as a virtual disk will not work properly and if the user wants to view the VMDK file data then, in that case, the user can prefer an automated solution to recover the data from the VMDK files.

Automated solution If The User is Getting VMDK File Not Recognized As a Virtual Disk Error

The above-discussed method is difficult to perform it requires strong technical hands to perform the entire process. In that case, if the user wants to preview the VMDK file data then the user can prefer an ultimate solution VMware file recovery software. This software is built with high tech and advanced set of algorithms to recover data from severely damaged, corrupted VMDK files.

Here are the important features of this software

1. Helps to recover valuable data such as documents, images, videos etc.
2. Ability to recover data from corrupted / damaged .vmdk file.
3. Option to recover data from FAT and NTFS file system.
4. Recover any size .vmdk file data.

Follow the certain steps to recover the data

• Download and launch the software.
• Click on Scan and choose an option scan virtual machine.
• Choose the Virtual machine folder and click on OK.
• Click on Scan option and After scanning export report will be generated.
• Click on Save button to save the report in CSV format.
• View the contents of virtual machine disk file.

Wrapping Up

From the above write up the, we have discussed the problem VMDK file not recognized as a virtual disk with the help of one query by the user. We have discussed the solution of this problem with the help of manual and automated solution. If the above manual method is difficult to perform in that case the user can prefer an automated solution in order to recover the data from the VMDK files.