She detached the VHDX, then re-attached it normally. This time, the drive letter appeared with a file system: NTFS.
Her heart sank. This wasn’t a simple fix.
No error. The disk mounted but showed as “RAW.” Not good. But it meant the header was still alive.
She then ran the next-level command:
She’d been backing up a client’s legacy SQL server to a 1.8 TB VHDX file for the past six hours. Now, the backup job had crashed. The error code——pointed to one thing: the VHDX file was corrupt. No backup. No replica. Just one giant, broken virtual disk.
By 2:18 AM, she had copied the recovered data to a brand new VHDX, reattached it to the VM, and booted the SQL server. The logs showed a clean shutdown recovery.
But she remembered a buried forum post from 2019. She opened and attached the VHDX manually—first as read-only.