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We have a SQL server hosted on a virtual machine. Our hosting company updated/restarted the server and for some reason the virtual machines became unbootable.

We've spoken to Microsoft and used a few higher level tools to attempt to recover the virtual machines but were unsuccessful. In browsing the file system the database folder doesn't even appear.

I'm wondering if there are any lower level tools that might be able to find and copy the database files. As far as I know the physical hard drive is ok, so I'm hoping there may be some way to recover the files themselves even if the rest of the virtual machine file-system is a loss.

Obviously we're in a bit of a bind, and any help/ suggestions are very much appreciated.

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  • is the VHD file still intact? As in - can you mount it like in 2008R2 or Windows 7? That would be the first step. What type of VHD file are we talking about?
    – TomTom
    Mar 11, 2010 at 15:32
  • sorry - It is a Hyper-V virtual machine (actually several virtual machines with the same issue) . The file is still there- and they can mount it but it won't boot and in browsing the file-system it appears that numerous files and directories are missing.
    – Apocalypse9
    Mar 11, 2010 at 15:42
  • well, atl east it means you can mount it and run chkdsk on it with proper methods ;) If you could not mount it it means you would have to repair THAT first.
    – TomTom
    Mar 11, 2010 at 17:19
  • Were there no backups of the VMs? Snapshots perhaps that you could roll back to.
    – Tatas
    Nov 22, 2011 at 18:04

1 Answer 1

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I suggest copying it, mounting it, proper chkdsk on it and see what happens.

If that does not work, there are data recovery tools / companies that could try to recover data in there.

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