She powered off the test VM, detached the old broken chain, attached the restored VMDK to the original FinServe-07, and powered it on.

She did something risky: manually edited the descriptor file of delta 14, pointing its parentFileNameHint to the actual CID of delta 13’s extent.

: Right-click the VM, go to Snapshots , and select Consolidate .

This report provides a comprehensive guide on how to restore a VMware VM using delta VMDK (snapshot) files. This scenario typically arises when the snapshot manager GUI is inconsistent, missing snapshots, or when performing manual forensic recovery from a datastore.