I have a drive with a deleted VMDK Flat file. I have search for the VMDK signature but presume it was overwritten in the process. Is there anyway to recover data from this sort of problem? Just searching for the NTFS file system bring highly corrupt files (no surprise).

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

It is quite complicated coz , such a big files oftently fragmented. Moreover, did you check is there is any additional delta falt file present ?
Make full scan in UFS, check all merged chunks and try to assemble them in order to get file corresponded to ...flat.vmdk.

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Angel Data Recovery

I've actually had quite a bit of good luck when it comes to deleted VMDK flat files, as they tend to created at a point when there is enough contiguous space to avoid fragmentation and the full amount of the file is allocated at the time of creation. That said, don't take it for granted that just because you can bring up a file structure that everything opens. Take the time to test and verify all the critical files wanted by your client.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Unless they did thin provisioning when they set up the VM. If they did that, it'll be a fragmented nightmare.

@OP, what's the host file system where the VMDK is stored? Perhaps your best bet will be trying to find a reference to the file location(s).

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

we can reconstruct fragmented vmdk files.

even if VMFS metadata is missing?
I would probably be interested

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

yes Doomer, will pm you.

I'm very interested in knowing this process as well. Would you mind sharing it?

I developed good skills to recover deleted vmdk files from VMware VMFS partitions, even for fragmented vmdk files and in cases where metadata is lost
Worked very well on cases where no dr software would help. Technique should be compatible with 70% or more of cases (but unfortunatelly not all cases)

Process is manual and requires in-lab physical access to full VMFS partition, so a good upload speed would be needed for dump uploading.
(VMFS partitions can compress very well depending on each case, I´ve seen 50% rates and sometimes even more)

I´m from Brazil, so price for USD and EUR customers should be very affordable
If anyone is interested in outsourcing, please send a personal message (PM)
(I will not reply in public here to avoid polluting on forum)

p.s.
I usually don´t advertise on this forum, but as this subject seems to have almost no solution via any software or internet foruns, I decided to leave a message here
If board admin thinks that this is not ok, please feel free to delete my post