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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.

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Problem solved... A bit embarrassing how simple the solution was and how over hyped the problem got.

So we got to a point where Microsoft support gave us excuses like that they can not help us because it is a vmware problem and that is not their product, we should contact them, and maybe it is a hardware error (we use data centers), etc. They also told us to initialize the disk. A simple google search says that initializing the disk will cause the disk to be formatted. Microsoft suport was pretty useless.
Some hard core data recovery software engineer also told us that at this point it is not possible to fix the problem, and our only hope is data recovery.

So the management started talking about spending thousands on recovery software to get as much of the data back as possible.

I found an article on SuperUser about a program called Testdisk that can build up a partition table from scratch.
Everyone was skeptic at first that a free tool could help, but I convinced my boss to give it a try.
It made the 10 TB virtual disk readable and accessible again in like 10 seconds I guess.

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