Upon attempting to power on the VM, vSphere returned the dreaded: "Failed to power on VM. The specified virtual disk needs repair (Corrupt disk)." Attempting to browse the datastore revealed the file server01_2.vmdk (the 200GB delta disk) present, but the system could not read its metadata. Part 1: The Post-Mortem Analysis What is a VMDK? A VMDK is not a single file, but a logical container. It consists of a small descriptor file (text) and a large extent file (raw data). Corruption often strikes the descriptor or the filesystem journal within the extent.
# Disk DescriptorFile version=1 CID=fffffffe parentCID=fffffffe createType="vmfs" RW 419430400 VMFS "server01-flat.vmdk" vmdk corrupted
for vmdk in $(find $DATASTORE_PATH -name " .vmdk" ! -name " -flat.vmdk"); do echo "Checking: $vmdk" >> $LOG_FILE Upon attempting to power on the VM, vSphere