Corrupted OS in VMWare Fusion on an iMac

[madmardegon]

Hi everyone,

I am not very skilled with Mac and the way it functions so I figured I would look for help here, I have a client that runs a particular piece of dental software, the software was built for PCs but the office had three iMacs that are about 4 yrs. old that needed to run it, so he installed VMware Fusion and put Windows XP and the software on the VM.  He then copied that VM and installed Fusion with the copied VM on two other machines.  The problem was first they had a virtual memory overload error because something was replicating files and filling up the memory.  Apparently that was taken care of but then two out of the three VMs failed with the error below:

I could only find one answer while Googling this error message about renaming the vmem file, but what I am worried about I is that if I do that and restart the machine the problem will start over again.  Anybody with suggestions?  I greatly appreciate any information.  I am not sure of the version of Fusion I believe they are running 5 or 6 from what the owner told me.  Would running Parallels be a better option, or running Bootcamp and completely separating the OSs be better?  Again any input would be so very much appreciated.

Thanks

Brandon

[WoodyZ]

Since you are "not very skilled with Mac and the way it functions" it would probably be easier to talk you through this, so if you're in the US send me a phone number via Private Message.

[WoodyZ]

Brandon, nice talking to on the phone, saved me from having to type everything.  The .vmx configuration file option I mentioned is checkpoint.vmState and if after deleting the Windows XP.vmss and Windows XP.vmem file and there is still an issue set that option to: checkpoint.vmState = ""

Do this with VMware Fusion closed.  If need be, have a look at: Editing the .vmx file for your VMware Fusion virtual machine (1014782)

[madmardegon]

Hey WoodyZ I really appreciate all the help, I started the process you gave me and it did not take me long to see what the problem was, I have never seen anything like this so I hope you have the insight I need.  So I opened up the OS bundle and instead of 1 .vmdk file there were 82, starting at s002.vmdk through s082.vmdk.  This was on both of the crashed machines.  The funny thing was that the files on one machine were all larger in the 1 to 2 GB range where on the other machine only the first was around 1.9GB and the ones following were around 320KB.  From what I have read on other forums today is this is normal but when I deleted all but vmdk 1 and then restored them and tried to start the VM the error was that it could not start because the file was split.  I hope you have some thoughts on this because I am at a loss.  I thought they were snapshots, but when I opened the snapshot app on Fusion it had none listed.  Any thoughts?

Thanks

Brandon

[WoodyZ]

Brandon, here is the link to Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 that I mentioned when we last talked.  From that link you can download the User Guide the Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 ISO Image and a utility to write it to USB Thumb drive if you want to be able to boot from USB and have it updated before going into the field.  Note: When booting a Windows VM's, because Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 is Linux based, one might have to temporarily modify the VM's Settings otherwise the Mouse will not track properly.   Usually temporarily setting the Guest OS to a Linux version will resolve this or in some cases temporarily removing the USB Controller and booting from Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 ISO Image instead of USB.  If booting from USB is needed and temporarily setting the Guest OS to a Linux version is not enough then manually editing the .vmx configuration file may be required. What combination of things need to be done depends on the VMware product and version and this affects older product versions more so then the latest.  As an example with VMware Fusion 6 and a virtual hardware version 10 Windows Virtual Machine booting without changing anything works fine. None of this of course is an issue when booting a Physical Machine directly.

When booting a VM from USB I use the Plop Boot Manager ISO Image, booting that first and then selecting USB from the Plop Boot Manager.

BTW Event though this isn't needed since there is still one Mac with a working copy to replicate nonetheless here is the link to How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting just for reference if ever needed.