Tools & conceptsTechnical

VM, Database and Application-Container Recovery Tools

No single tool reconstructs a virtual disk chain, a database or an application container end to end — structure parsers, native consistency tools, extraction utilities and format-specific analyzers each answer a different layer's question.

Eight tool roles across four container types

Virtual-disk structure parsers answer which child is actually active, which parent it expects, which guest blocks are allocated where, and whether the BAT or L1/L2 tables are structurally valid; see Virtual Disk Snapshot and Differencing-Chain Recovery and VHDX and QCOW2 Internal Metadata Recovery.
Hypervisor-native inspection tools are for verifying chain and metadata state, not for automatic write-repair run directly against the only copy of the original files.
Database native consistency tools — SQL Server's DBCC family and its restore/page-restore mechanisms, MySQL/InnoDB's own diagnostics and forced-recovery modes — read and validate a database's own internal structures using the engine's own understanding of them.
Database extraction and reconstruction tools come into play specifically when the engine cannot safely mount the database at all, and the goal shifts from repair to extracting whatever rows and objects can still be read directly from the page store.
PST/OST structure tools — ScanPST run against a copy, plus dedicated structural or mail-item extraction tools — work at the NDB/NBT/BBT level described in PST and OST Internal Structure Recovery.
Video container analyzers — atom/box parsers, FFmpeg/ffprobe, and MP4Box-class structural tools — read or rebuild moov/mdat relationships and sample tables rather than treating a video file as an opaque blob.
Hex and structure viewers support manual validation across every format in this cluster, from a VMDK descriptor to a PST header to an MP4 atom sequence.
Filesystem and imaging tools are needed first whenever the container file itself is incomplete or sits on unstable media — a filesystem or acquisition problem underneath a VMDK, MDF or PST should be solved before any application-level repair is attempted at all.

Organize by question, not by vendor ranking

The right tool for this cluster depends on which specific question is actually open: is the active snapshot correctly identified, is a page's checksum valid, is a PST's BBT reachable from its NBT, does an MP4's moov actually describe its mdat? Choosing a tool by reputation rather than by the layer it actually addresses is a common way to spend effort validating the wrong thing.

Repair tools rewrite the interpretation layer

Database repair commands, ScanPST, and container/virtual-disk repair utilities can all rewrite the very metadata that a careful recovery would have needed intact. Run them against a preserved copy, never against the only surviving original.