I am in the worst possible situation. Any help is like saving my soul and even more…
I had a machine on which Citrix Xen Server was installed and had three VMs and I was working on those machines with almost zero knowledge of XenServer.
Oneday I couldn't boot my machine and finally I had to recover my VMs. I made a couple of snapshots before the hard disk crashed but these were on the same machine 🙁
Now I took out the hard disk and connected it to a new machine with Windows XP using USB Sata connectors. I installed ubuntu on the machine and tried to browse the hard disk.
Now I want to know where are my VMs and snapshots. File ? Extension? Location?
How can I read the data in my VM. I am dying to recover one folder in any case which has 6 months of effort and I have to present that work in near future.
It's not just a tech question but my future depends upon it. Please help
Best Answer
Your best bet: Get a professional who really knows what he is doing have a look onto this.
Other than that, your first step must be to make an exact copy, bit by bit, of your disk in order to prevent doing more damage while you try to repair things. Get a second hard disk which is at least as big as the one you try to recover from.
From your description, I can't tell wether your hard drive is physically damaged or if you suffer from a logical problem, so I would recommend making the copy with ddrescue, which will continue to work even if it finds damaged sectors.
After that, I think XenServer uses LVM volumes for VM storage by default, but I am not sure so I won't make any more recommendations.