File not found: Virtual Disk.vmdk

[mewtwomiu]

Hi, my operating system is OSX Monterey and I use Fusion 12.2.5.  My mac is 7ish years and only has 250 gb of hard drive space.  Today, while I was using Excel/Windows via Fusion, I couldn't save an Excel file.  When I tried to restart Windows, I got the error message "File not found: Virtual Disk.vmdk".  I also checked my hard drive space and it only had 20 mb of space left.  

I work in Excel everyday.  Any help or number to call for help would be wonderful.

Thanks,

[Technogeezer]

by "I checked my hard drive space", I'm assuming that you have run out of space on your Mac's hard drive. You're going to need to free up disk space on your Mac's hard drive.

The first thing I'd do is to locate the virtual machine's bundle. Navigate with Finder to the folder containing the virtual machine, right click on the virtual machine, and select "Show Package Contents". A Finder window will open and show the files that make up your virtual machine, including the virtual disk .vmdk files. There will likely be more than one of them if you created the virtual machine with the default settings to split the virtual disk into multiple pieces. Post a listing of all the files in that window, so we can see if all the pieces exist.

Do you have any third-party anti-virus on the Mac and is it set to scan virtual machines?  If so, check to see if any of the virtual disk pieces have been quarantined. 

Do you have your Mac configured to manage Desktop and Documents folders with iCloud? If so, is your virtual machine stored in your Documents folder (or sub-folder).?

Open Disk Utility and see if there are any snapshots on the Macintosh HD - Data volume. If so, remove them and see if you can get disk space back. 

A 250GB hard drive is barely sufficient to run virtual machines on. You may wish to consider an external USB SSD and run your VMs on that drive.

I also hope that you have a backup of your VM, and that your backup is NOT a Time Machine backup.