If your Virtual Machine (VM) won't power on because it "cannot find a parent disk," the descriptor file might be corrupted or missing. 1. Manually Reconstructing the Descriptor
If the snapshot chain is corrupted or refuses to mount, you can try to flatten the disk into a single, standalone monolithic disk using vmkfstools . recover data from vmdk delta files
Power on the helper VM and use its OS disk management to assign a drive letter and browse files. 4. Recovery Tools & Software If your Virtual Machine (VM) won't power on
If the descriptor file ( .vmdk ) is missing but the data file ( -delta.vmdk or -flat.vmdk ) remains, you can recreate the header to make the disk mountable again. FTK Imager .
vmfs-tools (Linux), vmdk-dump , HxD (Windows), FTK Imager .