Had a VM the other day with a snapshot. Needed to make a new snapshot, but it refused. Powered off the VM to make the snapshot (failed) and then it wouldn’t power back on. Looked in its folder and found the -flat and -delta VMDKs (data intact), but no descriptor files.

Luckily the snapshot chain was not long and it was easy to recreate the descriptor files, even though vmkfstools did not like the ‘pvscsi’ controller option, so I used lsi and changed it to pvscsi it in the descriptor file.