Ok, so first I need to give a shout out to John Miller, who read my last post and promptly encouraged me to check out the VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta, which adds a nifty feature called “AutoProtect”. The idea is to have Fusion automatically save snapshots of your virtual machines as backups for easy rollbacks in exactly the same situation I find myself in now. Unfortunately, I didn’t upgrade sooner, because it looks like this is one of those “must have” features. The other neat thing about the 2.0 version is that it now includes the multi-snapshot feature I like so much in the Workstation 6.0 product. Now we can have the best of both worlds.
Now back to reality. What to do about the corrupt disk image? I’ve since learned that the smart guys at VMWare have known about this for awhile and have pinpointed a potential bug in the Mac OS that can cause virtual machines to get fried because of some problem handling unbuffered i/o. If you’re interested, you can read about it here. Wish I’d known about this sooner!
First, I decided to upgrade to the 2.0 beta to see if perhaps by some fluke of grace (?), I might get lucky and Windows might magically be restored. Not hardly. But I have to say, the new Fusion interface is pretty slick. Perhaps when I’m sane again, I can do a full treatment of the new features. Right now, I’m still too wigged out to pay attention to such details. I need to find a way to recover those lost VS2008 projects I was working on.
The next idea was to create a brand new VM and then try to connect to the old disk, perhaps by adding it as a second hard drive. That way, even if the registry got fried, I might be able to retrieve the data. I might even be able to repair the registry and somehow get windows to boot up again. First things first – how to access the old virtual disk drive?
Using the new Fusion beta 2.0 interface was a snap. They have a feature called “Easy Install” that automates the entire installation and then installs the VMWare Tools package for you. I decided to go with Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition with SP2 – the same as the one I was running before. (I’ve tried various flavors of Windows Server 2008 as well as the 64bit versions, but I don’t really see that much of an improvement especially since I’m using it mostly as a workstation for SharePoint development.). I had forgotten how fast this machine is. I allocated 3GB to the VM and configured it for 4 virtual CPUs. Even though it says “Setup will complete in approximately 37 minutes”, the whole thing was done in less than 10 minutes on the Mac Pro.
Once I had the OS installed, I couldn’t wait to attach the old drive and start poking around. So I opened the VM settings page and added a second hard disk, making a copy of the existing virtual disk from the other system. Then I held my breath, crossed my fingers and stood by the window a-wishin’ for a miracle…
I couldn’t believe how long it took to boot up – but boot up it did! Then I opened Windows Explorer and navigated to the My Computer node. Low and behold, there were recognizable files! Sadly, the “My Documents” folder was completely empty, so most of my documents were off to emerald city. Not that I even remember what was there exactly. But I know there was some good stuff in there. Oh well. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take what I can get. And you can best believe this was an important wake up call for me.
Here’s the deal:
- If you’re using VMWare Fusion – get the 2.0 beta NOW.
- Turn on AutoProtect to do periodic snapshots. After this experience, I have mine set to take a new snapshot every hour and to keep 10 copies for safe keeping. You can set it for every day, hour or half-hour and it’s smart enough to keep a range of snapshots to provide different restore options.
- From the VMWare Fusion Preferences menu, under the ‘General’ tab in the ‘Performance’ section, select the “Optimize for virtual machine disk performance” option. This turns off unbuffered i/o. If you choose the other option (optimize for Mac OS application performance) it writes directly to the disk, using less memory, but you run the risk of hitting that nasty OS X bug.
Next, I’ll start poking around and see what files I can recover. Then I’ll revert to the prior snapshot and see if the “My Documents” folder is still intact there. I should be able to get back most of my older document files. Anything else that was lost, well, what can I say? Ah, the cost of complacency.
JFH
