Hi there. I don't expect an easy solution, if any at all, but it seems my Virtual Machine finally crapped out. I was running a Windows 7 machine so that I could use 3 pretty archaic small apps (one of them which locks you out when you install it on a new computer without deauthorizing it first!). Since I'm still on Mohave, and was planning to upgrade to Catalina or Big Sur eventually, I figured I might as well upgrade to Fusion 11. Before doing anything I backed up the whole machine to the cloud, backed up docs and files to multiple HD's and cloud services, had a small snafu where I stupidly deleted the original parent Virtual Disk, but then recovered it from a local backup. I got the machine up and running again, did all my snapshot cleanups (reducing it from 3 to 2 in the interest of disk space), verified my various backups, and installed Fusion 11.5. I ran it, it upgraded the compatibility of my VM, booted it just fine. I tested everything, and I think I may have tried to run some MS Windows software updates that always failed anyway, and they still failed. So nothing new there, and I shut everything down to get back to work in those apps at a later date.
Ten days later, and Windows 7 won't boot up. It runs disk repair and cannot repair. Error is Missing OSLoader. My 16 yr old wizkid son did a bunch of digging in the terminal, looking through the tree, etc. He says it's corrupt. I downloaded the cloud backup of the VM from 10 days ago, tried to run it off an external drive, and same problem. I tried a fresh copy, downgraded it to hardware v. 12, opened it in Fusion 8.1, and same disk Missing OSLoader failure, no repair possible. I have a ~1 yr old copy on my regular Time Machine backup, but I don't know if that will give me the same problem and I'm exhausted at this point.
So is this it? Is this machine/HD recoverable in the slightest? Thank you .