Corrupted PVM file - Data loss

[muyg01]

Hi everyone, we have a client whose Macbook froze up on them over the weekend. They power cycled it and tried running their Win7 VM, but it never booted and noted an error of no drive found.

Upon looking at the system, the PVM for the Win7 installation was only about 3GB, whereas they have well over 100GB of data saved. We tried mounting the HDD file within the PVM file but the Parallels mounter is not able to mount it.

Any suggestions on recovering their data?

 

[Parallels User]

Do you have any idea why the Macbook froze? Have you looked into the logs?

It's highly possible this is the result of a malfunctioning disk. You may try to to find that 100 GB file with a file recovery program, but because this is such a big file and the computer has been used after the accident, it's more than likely that some sectors have already been rewritten. If this is an SSD, forget it, data recovery in SSDs is even more tricky.

Anyway, it should not be assumed that the mac froze for no reason because 'computers often do that'.

 

[muyg01]

System logs don't point to anything unfortunately. Client mentioned they were working on it over the past weekend, left it alone and came back to it with a black screen on the Mac with nothing responding so they did a forced shutdown. It's a MacBook Pro 13" (10.6.8 & Parallels 6) and has a 500GB drive. We tried running recovery software on it (searched for "deleted" file and another search for "lost" files) but no luck. Is it because the actual file still exists only in a smaller size?