Friday, February 06, 2009

VMWare Issue: “This Virtual Machine Appears to be in Use”

I had a power outage which caused a power loss to the external drive my VMWare virtual system’s running on – this is the wrong way to find out that the battery for my UPS is dead.

As a result, VMWare died a nasty death and hung up. I had to terminate its process in Task Manager to get it to restart, always a semi-risky thing.

When I tried opening up my VM again, I was greeted with the error message “This virtual machine appears to be in use” followed by some instructions to try and take ownership of the system. Those steps didn’t work.

What did work was going in to the VM’s folder and deleting the various lock folders and files, those with an extension of “.lck”.  Everything came up just fine after that.

Now I need to go get a replacement battery for my UPS!

20 comments:

DaveShack said...

Thanks Jim, just what I needed.

Unknown said...

I've had the same thing happen to me. Didn't take me long to plug my external drives into the UPS.

Anonymous said...

Thanks

zohner said...

Thanks for sharing. You just saved me from having to do a reinstall on my VM.

Wurzelmann said...

I was having the exact same problem and wanted to reinstall the whole thing, when I stumpled over your solution here... thank you very much!

PsyxiatroZ said...

Nice one! Thanx... ;)

citykid said...

power outage also here. same issue, fix worked. thx so much!

SloppyPilot said...

Just what I needed too, thanks!

Unknown said...

Thank you!

@thurmda said...

Similar situation just now (battery feel out of dev laptop)blasting the *.lck folders was the trick. Big thanks!

Anonymous said...

This helped..Thanks so much.

Anonymous said...

thanks a lot!!!

Anonymous said...

Thanks, it worked for me as well!

Anonymous said...

Worked for me, very convenient info

Anonymous said...

thanks

Unknown said...

Thanks! This was very helpful!

MFineman said...

Saved me as well! Thanks!

Ashok said...

Thanks Jim, really broke my head trying to retrive the VM.

António said...

thanks mate!!!

got the same problem but due to a blue screen.

Thanks :)

Anonymous said...

Thank you for sharing. You saved my day

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