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I recently had my system crash while it was running OSX Lion in a VMWare VM (VMWare Workstation 8; I use the VM to do iOS development without needing to actually buy/use a Mac).

The OSX VM is tempermental enough on a good day, but upon trying to restart it after the crash it promptly started greeting me with some very unhelpful "Failed to lock file" error messages that completely prevented the VM from booting.

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

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3 Answers 3

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The problem in my case was that the unclean shutdown of the VM had left behind a number of "lock" files in the filesystem. The error message says what specific lock file is causing the problem, though it does stop at the first lock it encounters. So if you fix one lock and then continue to get a similar message, check to see where the new lock that it's complaining about is.

I ended up having to track down 4 or 5 "*.lck" files scattered across a couple different locations in my filesystem. Deleting (or, if you're paranoid like me, moving to a new location) all of these lock files allowed the VM to reboot. It took a couple of tries for the reboot to actually take. As I mentioned, the VM is tempermental even under the best of circumstances.

Also note that there should be a "vmware.log" file that should also contain useful information about which lock file is causing the problem, and possibly any number of other issues that may be preventing the VM from starting. In my case this file was located in the same filesystem directory as the VM's primary virtual disk file ("*.vmdk").

Further information is available here:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=10051

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I just had this issue, and would like to augment the upvoted answer to include the location where I found the .lck file to delete. It was in

/Users/{myname}/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows 7 x64 Enterprise.vmwarevm/Virtual Disk.vmdk.lck

To get there in the Finder, I had to right-click on Windows 7 x64 Enterprise.vmwarevm, and select Show Package Contents. After that, it was pretty easy to find several .lck files, and to delete the remaining one after I closed the problematic VM.

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Here's my experiences with this subject.

The solution was understood at the sight and study of few generated folders and lck files from its last session. That's a reason for keeping logs.

  • Copy the .lck file in the DNS.vmx.lck/M32944.lck

  • Paste in the DNS.vmdk.lck/folder

  • You will see another .lck file, M648383.lck

  • Rename M32944.lck to M648383.lck (cut M648383.lck to desktop and rename)

Give it a try if you encounter a situation with VMPlayer when it crashes on every start. It could happen if you don't shut it down properly e.g. if you use Taskmanager to shut it down.

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