Sometimes, you’ll find yourself needing access to the contents of a VM’s virtual disk (VMDK), perhaps to retrieve data due to a VM biting the dust. Sleek Bill License Key. Maybe, a recent update is preventing you from booting the guest OS and you have no backups to rely on.

In this post, I’ll go over 4 different ways you can use to extract content from VMDK files. Before we move on, just a reminder that a VMDK is comprised of 2 parts; the descriptor and the flat file. The descriptor file contains disk information such as its geometry, ids and virtual hardware version. It is, in fact, nothing but a text file viewable in any text editor. The flat file is where the actual data lives.

Dec 15, 2013 - How to use the *.flat.vmdk file to restore a virtual machine. Easy method to restoring a VMware VM from accidental deletion of the.VMDK file. Neo Geo Emulator Pc Xp.

For further details why not have a look. Viewing a VMDK descriptor file in a text editor Note: The descriptor file is not listed under datastore browser but it can be viewed from the ESXi shell while SSH’ed using a client such as putty or directly from the console. For this post, I’ve used the VMDKs of both Windows and Linux VMs copying the descriptor and flat files to a folder on my Windows PC, given that some methods covered require both files. Note that you can also use tools like to remotely mount VMDKs without having to download them locally. Method 1 – Attaching a VMDK to an existing VM As trivial as it may sound, an easy way to access the contents of a VMDK, is simply to attach it to another functional VM.