I was using the Vsphere client trying to restart a windows 7 machine. The machine had it's primary OS on datastore1 and three 2tb drives labeled 2tbA 2tbB and 2tbC. The only actual data was on the OS and 2tbB. 2tbC quit responding and was preventing the machine from powering on.
I tried to just remove the datastore from the machine but that did not work. Next I deleted the machine thinking I could easily recreate it from the vmdk files. (VMware KB: Recovery of a lost or deleted virtual machine .vmx configuration file on an ESXi/ESX host )
I tried to recreate a new virtual machine and mount the vmdk files only to discover they are not there.
The contents of 2tbB -> 5254153e-7496d3f6-ad7e-0007e92ab5fd
/vmfs/volumes/5254153e-7496d3f6-ad7e-0007e92ab5fd # ls -lsah
1024 drwxr-xr-t 1 root root 1.1k Feb 11 00:58 .
0 drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 512 Feb 11 03:42 ..
10240 -r-------- 1 root root 9.4M Oct 8 14:22 .fbb.sf
261120 -r-------- 1 root root 254.7M Oct 8 14:22 .fdc.sf
2048 -r-------- 1 root root 1.1M Oct 8 14:22 .pb2.sf
262144 -r-------- 1 root root 256.0M Oct 8 14:22 .pbc.sf
257024 -r-------- 1 root root 250.6M Oct 8 14:22 .sbc.sf
4096 -r-------- 1 root root 4.0M Oct 8 14:22 .vh.sf
Is there anyway to recreate the vmdk and access the data drive? I don't mind wiping out the actual OS but would like to access the data still. I have a virtual windows XP I should be able to add it to. There are three Virtual machines all using datastore1, only 1 machine had access to additional datastores.