I have a CentOS installation that has gone bad, and is stored in a vmware virtual disk file. I have contacted vmware support and paid paid for support - in the end the disk could not be restored, but it is partially accessible if booted into maintenance mode - I can read data from the disk but the entire file system, which has suffered some level of corruption, is read-only. My original idea was to create a new virtual disk and attach it, boot the server, copy files to the new disk, then mount that disk to another VM and copy off what few files I can salvage.

The issue that I'm having is that the entire "bad" disk's file system is read-only, and cannot be repaired. As such, I cannot edit any of the files necessary to create new mount points, mount the new empty disk, etc... My next idea is to do the reverse - create a small disk, install a fresh CentOS copy to it, mount the damaged drive and copy what I can to the functional drive.

Generally speaking, is this possible if I'm lucky enough to have the partitions mount to the new installation? I've never attempted this before with Linux, but there are some fairly important files I'd like to salvage if I can.