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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?

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9 Answers 9

Reset to default
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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.

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  • This worked for me. Host OS is Windows 7 64-bit, guest OS is Windows Server 2008. I couldn't kill all the VMWare processes in task manager, so I just restarted, and then I was able to open the VM fine.
    – Sarah Vessels
    Oct 31, 2011 at 19:50
  • Worked for me on a Win7-x64 machine - guest system Ubuntu 10.04 Server.
    – Mateng
    Oct 30, 2012 at 17:55
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    Only needed to kill the vmware-vmx.exe process and was able to restart the virtual machine. Windows 7 64-bit, guest OS CentOS 5.5
    – clumsyfingers
    Apr 7, 2014 at 19:45
  • @clumsyfingers I ran into the same issue earlier today and vmware-vmx.exe was the only process that needed killing besides removing a few .lck folders in the directory where the VM resides.
    – Vinayak
    Feb 14, 2016 at 14:29
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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.

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  • Make sure you do this after rebooting your base operating system, this helps in a lot of cases.. or just manually restart the vmware service
    – Jeffrey Vandenborne
    Dec 16, 2009 at 22:13
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    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.
    – Phenom
    Dec 16, 2009 at 22:34
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    You should post that as an answer, it worked for me as well.
    – Kells
    Oct 14, 2010 at 19:28
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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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  • If you're making a comment, please post a comment, not an answer
    – Snowbody
    Nov 26, 2013 at 21:24
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    @Snowbody if you're making a comment, please read the post to the end. This is need an answer, and based on OP's comment, the correct one, too. Also worked in my case.
    – MandoMando
    Nov 27, 2013 at 0:06
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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).

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

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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

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