Hi there, Just a questions to see if anyone knows really, With a VDI I have got contains 3 volumes, 2 ext3 for /boot/ and /root/. But the last one is currently unknown. When booting the VDI file in virtual box it gets an I/O buffer error. But to go with this it crashes as it is attempting to move the root to the unknown partition and can't (from what I can gather on the latter part). Has anyone on here encountered this before or can think of potential solutions to solve this?
Unfortunatly the broken one is the one that has all the data on. The VDI is created off an image of a VMDK Flat file which contains all the data. From whats gathered all the data is stored on partition 2 (unknown partition type) that at boot everything points within there. I've tried a few recovery tools and am assuming its a ext2/3 partition as it is running Linux, But can't figure out how to get anything to read it as such.
Can't you use the VMDK first with VMware player, then normally transfer stuff out of a running system ?
The flat file won't boot on its own through VBox or VMWare. Both get an error of "VERR NOT SUPPORTED". Which looking claims is a corrupted image. However when using FTK Imager to create a RAW copy, then convert over to VMDK and VDI it boots just comes up with the buffer IO errors.
So you have a non-booting damaged VMware image, which can be converted to booting damaged Virtualbox image. But the damage is still there and it is clearly in part you want to retreive. So there is no solution for your case, because what is damaged is damaged. I guess you don't have backups, right ?
Nah I have no backup's. The virtual machine itself was not created by me, was given it to have a look at, got log files and can recover log files from the machine so it's a start so can see whats going on. The main thing stopping it booting currently is that the main partition on the drive is currently in an unknown format so when it tries to move stuff there in its boot process it fails as it can't read it properly, so have been trying to get this part working right. To explain further which I suppose would've helped it is a part of an ICA into investigating a server. The image does work it's just we have to try and fix it to get it going. The whole course so far is stumped and most are at the same stage outlined. We've been told we're close so just thought may be worthwhile asking on here to see if anyone has encountered this before.
boot a linux distro and re-set the type in fdisk? do you know what it's meant to be? or take a look at it with gparted?
Got a bit further with this tonight. After numerous walls hit.. Haven't tried those 2 yet adrock but are next on the list. Using R-Linux I've managed to recover data from it so am now in the process of carving it out to be imaged in FTK to then be processed some more but if all else fails I can get more log files so its a half win. If it boots it's even better Thanks for all the help, will message back again when I've tried Fdisk and gparted adrock.
