SUMMARY
This article will discuss how to recover files from a dynamic disk using an image based file level restore from a virtual machine.
ISSUE
Attempted to recover a file from the datastore of a running virtual machine, but when the image was built it could not be attached to through the windows share name provided.
RESOLUTION
File level recovery from an image based backup (no agent) is supported to CIFS or using an iSCSI initiator, however, the disk in this case was a dynamic disk of a Windows VM. Files from a dynamic disk must be recovered using the iSCSI initiator method, due to the fact that dynamic disk files cannot be recovered to CIFS at this time.
To recover files using the iSCSI initiator