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ahmd9
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎07-08-2012 04:31 AM

How do you drag files into a VM from a host computer?

I'm trying to figure out what is the secret of dragging files from the host computer into a VM operating system (Windows)? At times it works really well but then it just refuses to work and shows the crossed mouse whatever I do...

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2 Replies
WoodyZ
Immortal
Immortal
‎07-08-2012 05:07 AM

Drag and Drop is a nice feature however because it is flaky at times I choose most of the time to copy/move files via Industry Standard SMB/CIFS Shares and I use that because the VMware Shared Folders feature is flaky at times too.

Things to consider...  Uninstall/reinstall VMware Tools, uninstall/reinstall VMware Product, make sure the VMware Tools Service is running on the Guest OS, toggle the state of the VMware Tools Service and or...

Copy and paste the following in a Command Prompt and then press enter.

RD /S "%TEMP%\VMwareDnD"

When I'm in a situation that I need to use DnD and it stops I use the above command and sometimes also need to toggle the state of the VMware Tools Service after that.  This can be scripted to make it easier and it's faster then rebooting the Virtual Machine to clear it up.

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ahmd9
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎07-08-2012 10:47 AM

Thanks. After doing some additional investigation I noticed that the vmtoolsd.exe was running at 99% CPU time on the guest OS on a VM (which is Windows XP SP3, the admin account). So trying to restart the VMWare Tools service resulted in "The service is not responding to the control function" message.

So running all and the combination of the following commands in a batch file restarted the vmtoolsd.exe process but still did not solve the isse:

taskkill /f /im vmtoolsd.exe

rd /s /q "%temp%\VMwareDnD"

net stop "VMware Tools"
net start "VMware Tools"

Any more ideas how to automate it without restarting the VM, which clearly is a pain?

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