Set up
Running a home server with a 2TB HDD. Running VMWare ESXi 5.5 that has 2 guest OS; CentOS 7 and Windows Server 2012 R2.
There are 3 virtual disks (VMDK) thickly provisioned:

• 20GB CentOS 7 install
• 40GB Windows 2012 install
• ~1.9TB data disk for CentOS 7

Original issue
I left no space on the data store when creating the data disk which meant after shutting the Windows VM, there was no room for the swap file to boot it back up. Due to the size of the disk, there was also no room to perform a copy of the data disk to then be able safely convert it.

Attempted solution
Tried to find a way of slightly decreasing the size of the data virtual disk to give Windows enough space to load. Hole punched VMDK following this guide:
https://www.virten.net/2014/11/howto...ual-disk-vmdk/

In CentOS:

In ESXi:

Then attempted to shrink the partition after reading the following guide: https://www.howtoforge.com/linux_res...xt3_partitions

Here I got a message saying "bad magic number in super-block"
I tried the below which didnt work:

Followed by:

Before running the above command my file system was still intact - I could still see the individual folder names when mounting the disk. Now I just had an empty lost+found folder.
I then believed that maybe this issue was happening because my file system was actually XFS and not EXT4. So I tried:

Current and even worse issue
Now inside the lost+found folder its full of numbered folders. One of which has "Led Zeppelin" on it indicating that the underlying data is perhaps still there.
I have stopped tinkering with it now as I don't want to make it any worse, even though I realise the data is probably already corrupt.
Does anybody know of anything else I can try? Unfortunately the partition contains all of my data, most of which is not backed up elsewhere.

What you've got is what you've got. That "mke2fs -S" basically scribbled all over the xfs filesystem, corrupting both filesystem metadata and the contents of some files. All you can do now is try to copy whatever (if any) files remain and try to make sense out of what's in lost+found. You might be able to recover some more files with photorec (it's not just for recovering pictures), but you'll probably get mostly file fragments, and in any event the original filenames will be lost.

testdisk is another option that may help, but be very careful with testdisk as it can rewrite your disk whole partition table.

You by chance didn't run BleachBitch on it did you?

It is likely that in the 6 months since this thread began the OP has exhausted his efforts at recovery.

doh!

I didn't catch the date when I posted