Accessing a shared folder hard crashes VMWare Fusion (started happening recently)

[stembridge]

I access my Mac OS X Desktop as a Shared Folder within my VM, and have run it this way for years without a problem. Sometime in the past month or so, VMWare started completely freezing/locking up when I attempt to open the Desktop folder within Win7, or if I try to open a file from within an application running in Windows. I get no error message, just a Beachball Of Death, and VMWare will eventually (or not) report that Windows crashed and offer to restart. Sometimes I have to Force Quit (and kill several VMWare processes) before I can restart.

If I restart in Safe Mode, I can open/read/write files just fine. I can also "mirror" my Desktop (instead of sharing) and it works fine that way, too, but that approach is impractical as I no longer can see my normal Windows desktop within Windows, since it gets replaced with all the files from my Mac Desktop,

I have been unable to find any online articles that have been helpful in fixing this problem, and it's impacting my ability to get my work done.

Again, this has been working fine until recently. As El Capitan was recently updated, VWWare Fusion was recently updated, and Windows gets patches weekly, I'm not sure which, if any, of those may have caused the problem.

Suggestions welcome.

Here's my setup:

MBP Retina 15, Mid 2015 running OS X 10.11.5

16GB RAM (8GB assigned to Windows)

500GB SSD, 120GB assigned to Windows

Win7 Pro 64bit

VMWare 8.1.1 (3771013)

[vmxmr]

Have you tried uninstalling VMware Tools and then reinstalling them? Reboot your Windows 7 virtual machine between each step. Use Add/Remove Programs from the Control Panel in Windows 7, then use Install VMware Tools from The Virtual Machine menu in VMware Fusion.

[stembridge · Accepted solution]

I did try reinstalling ("repair") VMware Tools, but did not uninstall them first. Just did the full uninstall/install cycle and it still hard crashes Windows (no BSD, just freezes and VWware along with it). Both the VMware Fusion and vmware-vmx processes crash (as shown in Activity Monitor).

This is *only* happening if I share my Mac Desktop. If I share any other folder, it works fine. Again, this only started recently.

UPDATE

Playing a hunch, I removed an alias (which pointed to a file on a network drive) from my Desktop that I had recently created (I've had other aliases on my Desktop for many months, but none of them pointed to network drives), and it now seems to work okay. What's weird is that I initially put the offending alias in a Desktop sub-folder, and VMware worked fine until I rolled my arrow cursor over the sub-folder (did not click to open it), when it crashed again. I put the alias back on my Desktop, and "boom," crashed almost immediately, which seems to confirm the alias is indeed the problem.

Does Windows do some sort of predictive "read-ahead" as you're moving your cursor around and hovering over folders?

At any rate, the trigger seems to be an alias that points to a network drive, which hard crashes Windows / VMware.

Bug?

es

[pixelpilot]

@

Stembridge, just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to detail out this problem and your solution. I was having the same trouble and was at my wits end trying to figure it out. And even tho I did come across a similar problem documented in the vmware knowledge base it was poorly detailed and as such I breezed past it.

Anyway, I found that your solution worked perfectly for me as well and thought you deserved a shoutout for it. I can confirm that Fusion 8.1.2 still has this BUG and yes I do believe it is a bug because there is absolutely no good reason for this behavior. I have to believe that we are not alone in using aliases to quickly access content nested on shared hard drives of windows based servers. How this hasn't been a bigger issue is very surprising to me.

Obviously I have no idea whether VMware is addressing it, but by virtue of the fact that it's in their knowledge base, I gotta believe they're aware of it and they absolutely should NOT ignore it. Surely they must have the ability to detect somehow whether a file is an alias and force the software to subsequently ignore it.

Ok, end of rant. Thank goodness for folks like you, stembridge.

Peace.

dg

[wila]

Hello,

Reporting this as a bug (eg. raising a support incident) might actually help in getting this fixed.

The developer of the VMware Shared Folders feature does roam the forums, unfortunately he can't read everything.

steve goddard‌ have you seen this reported before?

--

Wil

[Darcyz]

Hi stembridgestembridge,

Really appreciated your work, we are trying to reproduce the issue.

1. Install the Fusion 8.1.1  with Guest OS is Windows 7 . Host is 10.11.5

2. Create network drive alias in the host desktop

3. Open sharing to share the folder "desktop"

4. Try to add the alias, change alias name or put it into subfolder, it still can work fine.

5. repeat the step 4 check mirrored folder->desktop, it still cannot hit the issue.

Is there any different between our steps?

Cheers

[stembridge]

Glad to have been of help, dg.

Darcyz - sorry for the delayed response on this! I'm running 8.1.1, and just tried to replicate the original problem, but it seems to be working okay now. Win7 has of course had numerous updates since (as has OS X), so who knows what "fixed" it since I originally reported the problem.

I will point out in the steps you listed, that I believe it was an aliased *file* I had created - not a folder or "network drive alias" as you list in your step 2.

If the problem comes back, I'll be sure to report it here.

Thanks,

es

[ronnie9999]

I can confirm this is still an issue as of Fusion 8.5.9 running Win7 on El Capitan with latest updates. Just (finally) updated my old 2009 iMac i7 to El Cap after running VM Fusion 6 on Snow Leopard for many years. Never had this issue before, so I'm not sure if this is an El Cap or Fusion issue since I updated both at the same time. Very grateful to stembridge for this post as it's saved me from blowing my brains out.

Very easy to reproduce this bug.

1. Share a folder that contains an alias that points to a folder on a server.

    e.g. in my Mac's Downloads folder I have an alias that points to folder "X" on my NAS. It doesn't seem to matter if I share "Downloads" with Windows as a Shared Folder or Mirrored Folder.

    NOTE: On the Mac I am connected to the NAS using the SMB protocol.

2. In Windows Explorer, try to open the Downloads folder by double clicking on Computer > Shared Folders > Downloads. Notice I'm not even trying to resolve the alias itself, just get to the folder that contains the alias.

3. Buh bye. If you're lucky Fusion will catch the problem and tell you that Windows has crashed. If you're not lucky it'll lock up and you have to Force Quit. In either case Fusion is hosed and can't restart itself properly, so you need to reboot the Mac. Happens every time for me.

4. If I remove the alias to X from Downloads, or even bury it in a sub-folder I can access Downloads no problem.

Thanks again for the solution, but seriously this should not be an issue after all this time. This is a very typical use case and navigating around my Mac's HD from within Windows shouldn't be akin to walking through a minefield.

I'm curious if this is still an issue on Fusion 10, although it almost doesn't matter because my perfectly-usable 2009 iMac isn't supported according to VMWare, so I'm not about to plunk down money if I won't be able to install it.

[borwickatuw]

I just ran into this running VMware Fusion 12.1.2! I was getting the error "VMware Fusion has encountered an error and has shut down Windows" and when I removed the shortcut from my desktop, the machine was able to boot again!

(The shortcut was to a Google Drive file so it also crossed filesystems.)

[bauct]

I am having the same issue with latest Win 10 2H2, under MAC OSX Monterrey, and had it in Big Sur before upgrading last week.

I removed every shortcut and the VM is stable, Until I try to access any shared mac desktop files. Trying to open any mac desktop file from the share in the win WM crashes windows. I removed and reinstalled VM ware tools, no effect.

I can still drag files between the win and mac desktop with no crash.

Any solutions out there?

Thanks!

[bauct]

Update: If I share my mac Downloads folder there is no issue. Only get the crash when sharing the mac desktop folder.

There is a discussion about a bug in VMWare fusions' handing of shared folders with illegal characters, which causes a crash:

https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/crashing-vmware-guests-with-a-silly-filesystem-bug-425ee43d85e4

[Technogeezer]

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

It's pretty well known that the shared folder implementation on Fusion isn't robust or performant - it needs work which VMware hasn't prioritized. For these reasons I'd avoid it for things like sharing home directories/documents/desktop folders. I'd use other mechanisms if possible which are likely to be higher performing and stable (including things like SMB file sharing, Dropbox or OneDrive if you have them available).