Restore Vmware From Delta Vmdk -

She couldn’t skip it. The VM would boot but corrupt data silently.

The corrupted block? It belonged to a deleted temp table from 200 days ago. Nothing of value lost. restore vmware from delta vmdk

And Dave? He called her later that week: “You restored from a delta? I didn’t think that was possible without losing data.” She couldn’t skip it

Now, the 100GB base VMDK had spawned 14 delta VMDKs, the deepest of which was 2.3 TB. And the VM wouldn’t power on. Error: Disk chain link broken. It belonged to a deleted temp table from 200 days ago

She did something risky: manually edited the descriptor file of delta 14, pointing its parentFileNameHint to the actual CID of delta 13’s extent.

Here’s an interesting story about a VMware restoration from a delta VMDK, blending real-world system administration tension with a touch of the unexpected. The Ghost in the Delta