Tag Archives: File system

Corrupted virtual disk with VMware

Wow, this article and especially one of its comments saved my day.

My computer crashed and one of the VMware machine hosted on it could not start anymore :

“Cannot open the disk ‘path of vmdk’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
Reason: the specific virtual disk needs repair.

Checking on the VMware forums, I quickly found the command that was supposed to help :

$ vmware-vdiskmanager -R /path/to/disk.vmdk
The virtual disk, '/path/to/disk.vmdk', is corrupted but the repair process has failed.

Damned ! I almost resigned restoring the last backup and loosing a week of work when, by chance, I found the article mentioned above.

As recommended, I downloaded the Virtual Disk Development Kit 1.2 from VMware, untared it and still doubtfully launched :

$ ./bin64/vmware-vdiskmanager -R /path/to/disk.vmdk
The virtual disk, '/path/to/disk.vmdk', was corrupted and has been  successfully repaired.

Saved! Thanks so much to the guys. I would have never thought about trying it, I wonder how they could find it.

But how is it possible that the utility coming with vmware workstation 7.1 suck so much and is not on par with other versions ?

ACL on Linux

Rights management on Linux is enough for most use.
In a few words, a file or a directory belongs to the owner and what you can do is positionning some right to this owner, to his group or all other users (= guests).
This is not bad, but sometimes you (or your application) may need more advanced right management, as on the latest windows versions : putting several owners with different rights, inheritance, etc.
There are named ACL (Access List Management) and they are supported on Linux also.
This is not going to be an how-to but just a brief informative introduction to ACL on Linux. You will find many how-to on the web if you need more.

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