When the actual problem began was some time ago so I’ll do my best to recount and provide detail but…
Periodically, I’ve had issues with guest systems having corrupted disk images. Whether it was due to shutting off without powering them down first or what, I do not know.
Repeatedly this had happened with my ParrotOS install and I had replaced it once or twice and another couple of times I had created a new VM with the same name and swapped out some VMDK’s (I think it was the VMDK’s) to restore the corrupt VM and retain its disk information.
This time I did the same thing and the disk didn’t come back. I recall it had happened after taking a snapshot and, down the line, when I encountered some issues, trying to revert to that snapshot and not much else.
Below is a picture of the VM’s filesystem, which seems abnormal to me. Notice the parrot-000001-.vmdk and the parrot-000002-.vmdk’s. This might be normal or it might not. Honestly? The multi-file hard drive system just confuses the bajesus out of me when it comes to diagnostics.
VMWare Guest-OS Files as viewed from windows host in command line.
Actual error on boot was basically that it’d go to the boot menu, select the normal/default parrot-boot mode, and it would go through about 90% of the boot cycle and then plop into an (initram-fs) shell with no GUI and limited functionality.
Now, I’d done a dumb hail-mary thing, after not touching this for months and just kind of randomly installed an updated parrotVM and swapped out the parrot.vmdk without thinking to backup the old one.. So if I wasn’t screwed before, I’m sure I am now, right?
Still, any information as to why this issue might have occurred and how to prevent it in the future would be much appreciated. If you need any more details, file contents on any of the files, or command output, please let me know.
Can someone shed some light based on this information as to what the problem may be? Is this VM recoverable/repairable?
Also, in the future, how might I take backups outside of the VMware snapshot functionality in order to better recover my information in case of a similar happening?
As of now, I’ve just started with a fresh VM, but I’d like to at least recover my saved files and perhaps installed tools on the old Parrot install. If that is at all possible, please inform.
![Count of triplets in Binary String such that Bitwise AND of S[i], S[j] and S[j], S[k] are same](https://www.rubin.com.np/wp-content/themes/customizr/assets/front/img/thumb-standard-empty.png)
