Flat Vmdk Recovery Site

: If your original disk was thick-provisioned, remove the line ddb.thinProvisioned = "1" from the descriptor. Alternative: Direct Data Extraction

In VMware environments, a Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) exists in two parts:

To effectively recover a flat VMDK, one must understand its structure.

vmkfstools -c <size> -a lsilogic /vmfs/volumes/datastore/VM-name/new.vmdk