At my company we have a virtual Windows 2012 R2 server running on VMware ESX.
The server has 3 disks attached on different LUNs.
(Disk 1 & 2 are on a smaller LUN containing multiple servers that is shared with other VMs)
Disk 3 is on a separate 10TB LUN that contains the 9,46 TB vmdk file and the rest is free space.
Two days ago an unwanted backup process (vmware netbackup) started that might have filled the free space on the LUN, something went wrong and the mapped drive 3 was no longer accessible.
It appears as disk 3 in disk management, however it appears as unallocated and Windows asks to initialize the disk. If I'm right that would erase all data from the disk.
Inside VMware client an error also appeared disk cap control out of range
with some values. After confirming the error the size of the disk was shown to be 2 GB.
Afterwards the backup process has been manually stopped on the Netbackup console, causing the size to return to its original (9.46 TB) value. The disk was still not accessible. Server was even restarted, and the problem persisted.
The data on the disk is very important for us and we are looking for a solution to save it.
Currently there is a byte level backup process running (storwize) that will finish in ~24 hours. In case anything goes wrong we can recover the damaged vmdk.
It would be best to do it right on the first try because this process takes 2 days to finish.
We can try to rescue the data after the backup has finished.
My question is, what would be the best way to recover the data?
If you have questions, please ask them in comment, and I will answer asap.
VMware version: 6.0.3
Update:
We contacted Microsoft support but they could not help.
Currently a recovery process is running that will take ~5 days to finish.