How to recover a VMware virtual machine

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.