Hard Drive Problems-File Corrupted (VMWare VM File)

I am using a MacBook Pro and am using the newest version of VMWare and running a WIndows XP Pro VM with it.

Recently my hard drive starting experiencing problems and going bad so I promptly got a replacement drive. Fortunately most if not all of my files seemed to be fine and not corrupt. The problem is my .vmdk virtual drive file is corrupt. It's approximately 30GB and when I try to copy the file to the new hard drive it hits 1.6GB and just stops. I have tried a backup program such as SuperDuper but it just simply skips that file without any errors.

Unfortunately I had a lot of data in programs like Quicken, TurboTax, and others that would be hard to recreate. I had done a SuperDuper mirrored backup of my drive a couple weeks earlier but the problem with the VM must have already been there since it also was not copied on the backup.

Is there any way to get around this problem? Even if I'm unable to get the VM working I would be glad to set up a new Windows XP VM and reinstall programs if I can simply get to the data on the VM file. I know the problem may be just a small part of that large file.

Are there any utilities I should run that can possibly repair or get to the data on this file? Is my best option to take it into a hard drive recovery expert? Thank you for your help.

When you were running VMWare Fusion and things were going along normally, did you allow the program to make a snapshot of your VM? If you did so, just restore the VM from the snapshot. You may lose some data if you didn't keep up with making snapshots, but at least you'll be able to recover most of the work you did.

If you didn't make a snapshot of the VM, you may be out of luck. As you know the VM is in realty one large file - and, unfortunately the larger the VM the more easily it can become corrupt.

I don't know of any other way to recover your data without unscrambling the VM file itself. However, you might get better answers by visiting the VMWare Fusion user forums and ask there for assistance. LINK

Regards.