Workstation Player V15 trying to open existing VM on new install of Mint 19.1 Nothing happens?

[GSivill]

Hi,

I recently discovered my Windows 10 VM running in WS Player 15 on my Linux Mint box was needing more disk space. As I was thinking of doing a clean install of my Mint 19.1 box and adding some new disks I backed up the VMWare folder in my home directory which contained the Windows 10 VM along with all my other stuff and then added my new disks and recreated my Mint 19.1 install.

Because on the new machine I had dedicated a 1TB SSD for VM (it was previously using about 300GB on my old set up) I moved the VMWare folder with the VM files in it to the new SSD.  I then installed WS Player 15 and opened it and according to the help information all I had to do was navigate to the Windows 10 .vmx file and open it and this would add it to my library.  So I did this and when I clicked to open the file nothing happens, the dialog closes and nothing else appears??

Can anyone point me to a log file or something that might explain why the open is failing?

I get no error messages or anything just nothing happens?

Graham Sivill

[GSivill]

I have discovered that if I double-click the vmx file it does open but it won't open if I start the program first and then select open. This is annoying as I want to open the VM but not start it so that I can expand the disk to use the greater space I now have available.

[GSivill]

I have tried starting VM Player from the command prompt using "sudo vmplayer" and this produces these error messages before the VMPlayer window opens:

I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml"

(vmplayer:2859): Gtk-WARNING **: 22:47:21.614: Inserting action group 'Base' into UI manager which already has a group with this name

(vmplayer:2859): Gtk-WARNING **: 22:47:21.614: Inserting action group 'WindowActions' into UI manager which already has a group with this name

Hopefully this may explain why opening the VMX file from the UI does nothing?

Graham Sivill

[GSivill · Accepted solution]

Ah, finally found out what the fix is. In Linux Mint, go to System Settings >> Privacy - Turn "Remember recently accessed files" to "ON" and also make sure "Never forget old files" is in the "ON" position.

Now when I open my vmx file it does appear in the list and you can then edit the settings and then start it.

I was therefore able to resize the disk and make it use most of my new SSD.

Hurrah!

Thanks to ricksdunn and his/her post here:

Opening existing VMware Player 12.x Virtual Machines in VMware Player 14 fails