topic Re: One guest vm is not auto starting in VMware Workstation Pro Discussions

One guest vm is not auto starting

Izibizi — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 10:25:38 GMT

Workstation 17 host on windows machine, and 3 windows guest vm.

All 3 VMs are marked to auto start. The service is enabled with correct user.

Only 2 of the 3 VMs are started after boot.

The third VM is windows server 2012 r2. It starts with no issue manually. It also starts by executing vmrum.exe.

I need it to auto start but can’t figure out why it is not.

thanks.

CarltonR — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 09:55:15 GMT

It would be useful if you could provided more information on what investigation, diagnostics, and research you have undertaken.

Izibizi — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 11:09:53 GMT

I looked at event viewer and found nothing that could indicate vmware autostart error.

I looked for logs in the VM guest folder, but no log is created after boot until I start it manually.

I have no idea where to check the autostart process.

Izibizi — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 15:01:53 GMT

One more information:

All VMs I moved from the old box running workstation 12.5 to the new box running workstation 17.0.2 are having the same issue.

HELP

Izibizi — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 17:50:49 GMT

OK I found the problem.

The vmx file moved from the old box had its first line:

.encoding = "windows-1255"

I changed it to

.encoding = "windows-1252"

and all starts automatically.