I have a Windows 2008 server running right now in production (luckily). What seems to have happened is we were upgrading from ESX 4 to 5.x and adding more hard drive space to the two ESX 5.x servers we have. When doing so we moved a VM to the second ESX box to do the upgrade then moved it back afterwards to upgrade that one from 4 to 5 and add hard drive as well. I do not know exactly how, but not all the vmdk files were migrated back to the server after upgrade and it came up and is running so we did not notice right away. Then when trying to do a snapshot for an upgrade to components of the 2008 server it failed with unspcified file not found.
I did some research and it would seem one of the files is missing ,<server name> 000007.vmdk out of 12 vmdk files is gone. So we have been running in snapshot <server name> 000012.vmdk and collecting all these files and cannot consolidate or take a new snapshot. (we are talking a long time now) so I have read you can recreate a enpty file and then consolidate, but in never doing so myself do not feel confortable without some guidance as the information I found is for ESX 3 and we are running ESX 5.x
I have attached the log file that shows the error and my attempt at fooling it by recreating blank VMDK file.
Thanks