We’ve all been there. You go to power on a virtual machine, and instead of a familiar boot screen, you’re greeted by an error: “Failed to open disk: The file specified is not a virtual disk.”
ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic" ddb.geometry.cylinders = "[CYLINDERS]" ddb.geometry.heads = "255" ddb.geometry.sectors = "63" ddb.longContentID = "b5e0dbe93277d7e7d70505c1" ddb.thinProvisioned = "0" ddb.toolsVersion = "0" ddb.uuid = "6000C299-1234-5678-9abc-def123456789" ddb.virtualHWVersion = "13" restore vmdk descriptor file
Have you recovered a VM using this method? Let me know in the comments below! We’ve all been there
Create a new file named exactly like the original (e.g., WindowsServer.vmdk ) using vi or nano . Create a new file named exactly like the original (e
Run this command against the flat file:
Always take a checksum (MD5) of the -flat.vmdk before editing. One wrong space in the descriptor file is fine—it will throw an error. One wrong offset? That corrupts the partition table.
You check the datastore, and everything looks fine—your large flat VMDK (usually named vmname-flat.vmdk ) is sitting right there, taking up 100GB. But its tiny sibling, the descriptor file ( vmname.vmdk ), is missing or corrupted.