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I'm running Windows XP as guest on VMware Player 6.0.1, but I'm getting a black screen. The VM starts up, I see the XP logo screen as it loads, but then the welcome screen never appears.

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It's worth noting that this VM is running inside another VM running a Windows XP guest; the outer-host is Windows 8. Everything is responsive, I can move the innermost-machine window around, even resize it, but it won't display the welcome screen.

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According to ( Ubuntu 11.04 VM shows a black screen in VMware Player ) and ( Issue while loading vmware fusion 3.0 ), enabling hardware graphics acceleration may fix black-screen issues for some guests, but my VMs already have it enabled, and my screen doesn't start black, it goes black, so I don't think it's the same issue. I've also looked at ( Get black screen at logon/welcome? ), but as I've shown in my screenshot, adjusting the screen resolution of the guest doesn't help.

What is the problem here, and if it's fixable, how so?

Please, no harsh-comments along the lines of "don't run a VM in a VM!!!". I'm aware it's not a recommended activity, this is just for fun.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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In the Virtual Machine Settings of the guest that is blank, under Hardware, Display, try turning off Accelerate 3D graphics.

When I have the box on, under Linux Mint 16 (ubuntu), the guest will be black on every screen except the main screen--unless I turn off the 3D acceleration as noted above.

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Why do VMWare virtual machines stay on a black screen on start?

When starting a VM, VMWare will try to connect to this address (which is localhost in IPv6 format on ports like 11527 or 11535 etc.):

vmware.exe - [::1]:11535 (IPv6)

This is needed for the VMs to work, I don't know what it is, but I just know that my VPN, and one other time, my proxy, were blocking vmware from establishing this connection, thus I was getting the black screen issue.

Proxifier

So I turned off the VPN, and in the second case which I was using Proxifier, I added a rule inside the Proxifier program to direct all vmware.exe connections (not route them to proxy server), and the problem was resolved.

Issue also reported and discussed here: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/454006

vmware

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