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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

Helpless
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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.

Sven
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  • Thanks for your response. Can you tell me where exactly Xenserver saves the VMs. I have a folder in ect called LVM which has archive, backp and cache directory. I am unable to access these but is this the location where VMs could be found??? – Helpless Apr 03 '11 at 13:30
  • Sorry, I am not an expert on XenServer, just tested it once for a few days, but I can't tell you about its data storage. What I can tell you is that these directories only contain config informations. You could try scanning for LVM volumes with lvscan and post the output here, after you did the backup. – Sven Apr 03 '11 at 14:05
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1) What happend with your hard disk? 2) If you could some kind of way to clone your drive, do it 3) Working with Citrix XEn server not such hard as you think , all VMs located continiosly. It is important to know which File System was inside those Vm.s 4) I recommend to ask about your problem on hddguru.com forum . There a lot expert guys who working in data recovery field. They know much

Teh
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