Henrik Sommerfeld

VMware Workstation 9 User Hostility

The main reason I use VMware Workstation is the user-friendliness compared to Hyper-V or VirtualBox when using multiple machines in a common virtual network. Today I discovered a thing that could be made easier however. I’m mainly writing this for my own reference, if I stumble on the same thing sometime in the future, perhaps someone else does to.

I copied a group of virtual machines to a new disk and when I migrated them from an earlier version (7) I must have made some error, because the reference to the AD machine was still referring to the old disk. This was discovered when I had removed all the machines from the first disk where I now had other stuff occupying that space. VMware couldn’t find the machine at the path it expected it to be at. Fair enough, must be a simple thing to change that path, right?

VMware Workstation 9 File not found
Could not open virtual machine. File not found.

With the AD machine selected every option is greyed out, no prompt “would you like to browse for the file”, nothing. So I started looking for a settings file, searched the registry for that incorrect path and finally I found it. This is how to fix the issue (I can think of more intuitive ways to support this in the product).

  1. Close VMware Workstation.
  2. Open C:\Users\YourAccountName\AppDataRoaming\VMware\inventory.vmls as a text file.
  3. Search the path from the error message (in my case C:\VMImages\TIBP 2.0\TIBP - AD\TIBP - AD.vmx) and change it to the correct path.
  4. Open VMware Workstation again and…voilà, it works! 😊
VMware Workstation 9 File found
Could not open virtual machine. File not found.
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