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!

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20 comments:

  1. DaveShack2/23/2009 11:28 PM

    Thanks Jim, just what I needed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown2/25/2009 12:52 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous3/09/2009 11:50 PM

    Thanks

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  4. zohner10/25/2009 10:21 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wurzelmann1/04/2010 12:37 PM

    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!

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  6. PsyxiatroZ3/09/2010 9:00 AM

    Nice one! Thanx... ;)

    ReplyDelete
  7. citykid5/14/2010 9:49 AM

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

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  8. SloppyPilot5/26/2010 11:29 AM

    Just what I needed too, thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Unknown11/18/2010 10:35 AM

    Thank you!

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  10. @thurmda7/19/2011 10:59 PM

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

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  11. Anonymous11/24/2011 9:45 AM

    This helped..Thanks so much.

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  12. Anonymous11/01/2012 9:34 PM

    thanks a lot!!!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous2/25/2013 3:44 AM

    Thanks, it worked for me as well!

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  14. Anonymous6/04/2013 7:05 AM

    Worked for me, very convenient info

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  15. Anonymous7/12/2013 5:07 AM

    thanks

    ReplyDelete
  16. Unknown9/09/2013 7:48 PM

    Thanks! This was very helpful!

    ReplyDelete
  17. MFineman9/12/2013 1:12 PM

    Saved me as well! Thanks!

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  18. Ashok10/24/2013 3:31 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  19. António10/30/2013 4:52 AM

    thanks mate!!!

    got the same problem but due to a blue screen.

    Thanks :)

    ReplyDelete
  20. Anonymous9/19/2014 5:21 PM

    Thank you for sharing. You saved my day

    ReplyDelete