What's kind of NIC hardware is Windows 7 asking about when it asks for a device driver? What does the Device Manager say about the networking card that it's found?

If Windows 7 is like Vista, it probably doesn't have a AMD PCnet NIC driver out of the box. If you upgraded from a Windows XP VM, the NIC is probably being offered to the VM as the PCnet NIC, which would explain why Windows 7 is complaining about a missing driver.

My bet is that Windows 7 VMs have the same default virtual NIC type as Vista VMs. (I don't have a copy of Fusion 3 yet to try this out). The defaults for Vista VMs are, I believe, an Intel e1000 NIC, which Vista had an out-of-the-box driver for.  Try shutting down the VM (not suspend), modify the VM's OS type setting to reflect that it's a Windows 7 VM, not a Windows XP VM and then reboot the VM. See if the NIC gets a device driver claimed.

If that doesn't work, shut down the VM, exit Fusion, and add the following line to the .vmx file found in the VM's bundle:

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

Start Fusion and the VM and see if the device gets a driver assigned properly.

Sounds too simple, but try restarting your mac.  There are a couple other threads about some issues with the network adapter, and that could resolve your problem.  (assuming you haven't tried that anyway)

Hi Roger,

Thanks for the post and sorry about the problems you are having.  When you say you upgraded your XP virtual machine to Fusion 3 w/o issue, what did you upgrade from?  When you upgraded dod yoou do the tools install at this time?  Which version of XP and Window 7 are you upgrading from/to?  What OS are your Mac's running?  When you installed tools again in your Windows 7 VM did you notice if you received an error during the install of the network driver?

Any additional information you can give me would be helpful.  I will try to reproduce this issue in-house.

Sincerely,

Michelle Barreda

VMware Fusion QA

I am having a similar issue. Migrated from parallels, running windows 7. Removed the parallels tool, installed VM ware tools and still no network driver. Everything else seems to be working, but no network. On Fusion 3.

Hi Roger,

What version of XP?  Was it professional (32 or 64bit)?  Just want to make sure I follow your exact workflow. Can you collect the support information and send it to me?  You can do this using the Help menu while Fusion is running. This will create a tgz file that you should be able to email to me.

Thank you,

Michelle Barreda

VMware Fusion QA

Yes, you can attach it to the post.

Thank you,

Michelle Barreda

I had the same issue this morning. my 2008 and windows 7 box could not connect to the Network adapter. After reinstalling the tools and rebooting each VM, I rebooted my MAC and everything to seems to be working again.

Was there any resolution to this? I am having the exact same issue.

MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4 GB 667 MHz SDRAM

Vmware 3.0.0

Windows 7 Professional on Bootcamp Partition

have you tried rebooting your MAC? Worked for me.

I had the same issue as mentioned before. Tried reinstalling, rebooting nothing worked. Finally went into Device Manager and told windows to look for the driver, it found it, installed it, took another reboot for it to finally connect. The first time it gave me an IP address conflict.

Try that and see if it works.