In one aspect, a method includes powering down a target virtual machine (VM), removing the target VM from an inventory of virtual machine hosts after powering down the virtual VM, configuring a shadow VM by assigning an ID to the shadow VM to be the same as the target VM and by attaching a target VMDK to the shadow VM, adding the shadow VM to the inventory and powering up the shadow VM to run no more than a BIOS and to enable access of the target VMDK.