Hyper V: I made a mistake

[Mabrito]

I brought a 320gig hard drive to put my Hyper V files on and I copied over the two folders Hyper V creates: the folder with the disk image and the folder with the virtual machine files and snapshots. However, I did not know there was a Export option to move the machines over and now I lost a lot of data in my VM and this VM was hosting my Exchange server. Needless to say, I screwed up as I simply can't reinstall Exchange without removing it from the organization first.

Is there anyway to get this VM up and running again or am I SOL? This is a test/learning server so its not a major lost, just a huge inconvenience as now I most likely need to go through all the manual steps on removing the Exchange organization from the tree and then reinstalling it.

 

[Mabrito]

I am going to give this a try since I really have nothing to lose: http://itproctology.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-manually-merge-hyper-v-snapshots.html

 

[oDii]

You can manually edit the .XML file that points to where the snapshots/.VHD files are when the vmms service is stopped. You need to configure it not to restart, but once it is stopped you can edit the file normally. Merging snapshots with their parent is not going to help if you've since moved the family of VHD files to where they are not supposed to be.

 

[lizardking009]

Easiest fix is to simply build a new VM around the existing VHD file.

 

[Mabrito]

I ended up rebuilding the VM and doing a clean installation. I was able to merge the VHD files but when I created a new VM with that VHD file, the network adapter was all kinds of messed up and couldnt reach my network. Tried rebuilding the network adapter and everything but nothing work. So I said screw it and just started from square one.

After 3 hours, everything is good now and now I know not to make that mistake.