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I was running Ubuntu in VMware Player. It froze up when I was using it, so I killed it with the Task Manager. The reason it froze was because I ran out of disk space. So after killing the process I made more space. But now, if I try to run the virtual machine again, I get the following error

Error while powering on: VMware Player cannot connect to the virtual machine. Make sure you have rights to run the program and to access all directories it uses and rights to access all directories for temporary files.

How can I fix this, or at least recover some of my files inside the virtual machine?

Hennes
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Phenom
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9 Answers9

11

What happens is that vmware lock some files while it's running.

So, there's no need to recreate VM or rebooting windows whatsoever. All you need to do is to kill all vmware processes.

So, just open windows task manager and look for vmware in the processes tab, kill these process and restart vmware.

emathias
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It sounds like one of the files that VMWare uses to describe the machine got corrupted. Try creating a new VM, and attaching the disk from the corrupted VM to it as the primary disk. If the disk itself isn't corrupted, it should boot right up.

If it doesn't boot, you can try attaching the virtual drive to a newly installed VM as a second disk, and trying to recover your files.

Joe Internet
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Kill all the VMware process and restart the application will resolve the issue to start a VM

VMware Workstation cannot connect to the virtual machine. Make sure you have rights to run the program and to access all directories it uses and rights to access all directories for temporary files.

Shiju Jacob
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This seems to be the right answer solved and posted by OP (Phenom) originally as a comment:

Actually all I had to do was restart Windows-7. After restarting I tried running the virtual machine again. Instead of starting from the hibernation state it started from the power off state. After I logged back in everything was there. –

It'd be nice to see an accepted answer when coming to this page.

MandoMando
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Another method of getting your VM to run if it won't power on is to check if you previously suspended it. Sometimes I have come across situations where the suspend file was corrupt and prevented the VM from powering on. Deleting the VMSS suspend file (which has some risk associated in the form of unsaved work if you left apps open when you suspended the VM) and associated VMEM memory snapshot file will make the VM power on again and perform a clean boot.

Jason
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I put my Xp Pro in suspened mode. When i tried to run the wm again i got the error described on this thread. In my vm folder, deleting the .vmss and .vmem and nvram files, it worked for me and i was able to run the wm again.

(Wm player on Win8 pc running a WinXP Pro machine)

Marco
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For my situation, which mirrored yours, compacted the disk, lowered RAM to less that 1 GB, shutdown the guest, restarted it. I then updated the VMware "tools". No trouble there after. Rob

Elias
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I managed to get XP PRO Installed no problem using VMware Player, but at some point I ended up not being able to power it on. I tried all sorts of things to fix without success.

However, after first installing the machine, I had backed up (with copy files) the complete folder at:

C:\Users\User\Documents\Virtual Machines\Windows XP Professional to

C:\Users\User\Documents\Virtual Machines\Windows XP Professional Copy

To recover I simply copied all the files from this backup into the Windows XP Professional folder and I was able to get up and running again without having to re-install everything (in my case: XPPRO + All Updates + dotNet3.5 + SQL ServerExpress 2005 + Legacy XP Application).

Neil Edmondson
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I had the same issue and solved it reinstalling the VMPlayer.

ejaenv
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