How to recover a VMware virtual machine

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)