VMWare disk crash

I was going to a meeting, so I just folded my laptop shut and was off. After the meeting my vmware disk image was corrupt.

So what to do?

I downloaded the Virtual Disk Development Kit (requires registration), and pretty much followed this recipe: http://blog.ijun.org/2011/10/vmware-specific-virtual-disk-needs.html.

Then attempted to start the VM, but starting it seems to corrupt the disk again, so…

Repaired the disk again, and then mounted it on my laptop, using the vmware-mount command from the Virtual Disk Development Kit. MARK: The mounted drive was only accessible through the same command window where the mount command was run. I was then able to XCOPY all my files, so that I can copy them to a new vmware image and continue my work.

TIP: Defragment your VMs and VPCs

I have several VMs (VMWare) and VPCs (MS VPC), and one of them in particular has been performing worse and worse, so I thought it could be good to defragment it.

Now there’s internal fragmentation and there’s external fragmentation (just like indexes in SQL Server :P). The internal fragmentation is handled using the windows defragmentation tool inside the VM or VPC. External fragmentation occurs if you have set your disks to grow incrementally as needed. You could also say that all the space for your virtual disks should be reserved, and if your physical disks were defragmented in the first place, there would be no external fragmentation of your virtual disks. But if you let them grow incrementally, or your physical disk was fragmented when you created the virtual disk, there might be some fragmentation.

So I found this excellent tool from Sysinternals: http://technet.microsoft.com/nb-no/sysinternals/bb897428(en-us).aspx

Now I don’t need to defragment the whole physical disk. I can just defragment one file at a time. Should save me some time :)