Restore Vmdk Descriptor File -

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.”

Run this command against the flat file:

Disaster Recovery: How to Manually Restore a Corrupt or Missing VMDK Descriptor File restore vmdk descriptor 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. We’ve all been there