Friday, November 2, 2012

VMware Fusion - "No permission to access this virtual machine." error

For those of you that use VMware Fusion on the Mac may run into this issue so I thought I'd post it for others to see. Basically I believe I ran into this issue as a result of running a Macware Disk Tools Pro app on my machine and running the "Defragment Files" feature against my MacOS boot drive. The error I was getting when I tried to launch a VM was generally this: "No permission to access this virtual machine." The reason I believe the defragmentation was the cause was because I remember Disk Tools working on the *.vmwarevm files; it was taking a long time to process.

Anyway, after several google searches, I found a post buried in the VMware community forums where some people were talking about this issue but in the Windows VMware Workstation platform. Figuring I'd give it a shot, I took this info and applied it to the Mac side of things and was able to get it resolved! Here's what I did:

1. Right-clicked on the *.vmwarevm file that is having the issue.

2. Select "Show Package Contents" from the context menu

3. Rename all folders with a ".lck" to ".lckOLD" (or take a risk and delete them)

4. Re-open the file within VMware Fusion.

BINGO! Worked like a champ. It looks like VMware Fusion automatically creates fresh ".lck" folders on it own too. (NOTE: One thing I did do afterwards was go back into the 'package contents' and delete the old *.lckOLD folders.)

That's it! Hope this helps someone down the road!