The whole concept is clear now. Learned a lot the last few days.
Unfortunately the suggestions did not work. I believe this is due to our own mistake. We have powered on the machine without the snapshots and therefore altering the main harddisk file.
A good learning experience.
Luckily, this was a testing environment for one of our production systems. My colleague had just written some extra routines that have been lost now.
A good learning lesson. Having backups available for the production system but never implemented a backup solution for the test environment.
Losing a machine is one of the nightmares of a SysAdmin. It just happened to us ☹.
Luckily no production data is lost. Just a couple of days of work in a test environment.
We will start rebuilding the test environment (also a very good lesson ☺ ) and make sure that we have backups in place from now on.
I would like to thank everyone involved in thinking of a solution. Your help is very much appreciated!!!!
Remko