Lost *.hdd Package, recovering HELP!

The thread was moved from "User Solutions and Workarounds" by Xenos

Hi,

Yesterday I encountered the very serious Leopard-Move-Files Bug.

Long Story
Yesterday I decided to run Parallels Compressor in order to shrink my VM. It worked, the file size was reduced to 17GB. Well, in order to run Parallels compressor I moved my VM Folder to my external HDD, I removed all snapshots, compressed it and after that I run Parallels to see if it still works. It worked. I shut down the VM and moved the VM Folder back to my Internal HDD. At the end of the moving process I got an error that the moving failed because the file is still in use. I noticed that I shut down the VM but Parallels was still running.
I shut down Parallels and closed the error dialog.

BAM!

My VM Folder was gone. It was neither on my external HDD nor on my internal HDD. OS X decided to delete it although the moving process failed. §$%&§*#!!!!!

The Recovery
So, I run a recovery Tool on my External HDD to recover my VM Folder. It discovered 4 files in my *.hdd package:

winxp.hdd.0.{8659f5b2-0a16-49d8-910b-914fe82508b8}.hds
winxp.hdd.0.{5fbaabe3-6958-40ff-92a7-860e329aab41}.hds
winxp.hdd.0.{6abe3189-e3ee-4fd0-8f83-01c9d5bae044}.hds
DiskDescriptor.xml

Now I'm faceing the problem that I can recover those files, BUT, I can recover at least 20 versions of them with different date and diffrerent size. (see attachment)

I tried to recover the files with the eldest dates, Parallels opened it but could not boot.

Can somebody explain me what *.hds files are and the difference of the 3 *.hds files?
Does Parallels need all 3 *.hds files?

regards
Arret

 

Hello Arret,

These files are the first snapshots of your Guest OS and you can recreate the Virtual Machine using these files in the state of the first snapshot.

You should take the latest (and the biggest) of these files, make a copy of it and paste on your desktop. Rename this copy - let it be WinNew.hdd.

Create a new VM in Custom mode and use the WinNew.hdd file as a virtual hard disk for the new VM.

Best regards,
Xenos