Locked Fusion .vmdk file Win 7 on High Sierra

[lynnesite]

Hello all,

Failed partition table on an iMac Fusion storage has annoyingly turned out to be a failing hard disk.

Happily, my laptop's VM Fusion 8.5 is operating perfectly, and yes, it is running on High Sierra. I now know that is theoretically incompatible but I've run on the now dying iMac that way with this mix for a long time without errors.

Now I'm trying to operate instead from the iMac's backup drive and get the error related to how Fusion was merely suspended and not shut down. I guess I need a new habit and that backup must be manual with a full shutdown of Fusion.

Anyhow, I would really like to get either this version going or upgrade as necessary. I can see that my package is chock full of probably unnecessary files. Log file, package contents and vmx attached.

thanks in advance,

Lynne

[lynnesite]

I guess if nothing else, I can do a full shutdown on the laptop's version and copy it over. But would prefer to have the much more up to date Win 7 (okay, an oxymoron) contained in the backup drive instead.

[wila]

Hi,

Removing the .lck folders probably gets it going again.

Re. a lot of unnecessary files. Not seeing many, most files are required and removing them will break the VM.

There's a few core files from a previous crash that can be removed (vmmcores*.log) and most likely also the 2 debug files, but would need to see more details to be sure.

The rest is all needed.

Re. backups with VMs shutdown, yes that's the only reliable way if you do this manually.

If you want to make backups with a VM running then you would need to use the backup software I wrote (see my signature).

Time Machine cannot be used in that scenario, nor is Time Machine reliable for virtual machine backups.

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Wil

[lynnesite]

Thank you. I use SuperDuper for backups using their "smart update" (only changed files).

I'll check out your solution, geez I displayed my old PC roots by jotting down *.lck!

Lynne

[wila]

Hi,

Superduper is fine. But you will have to shut down the virtual machine in order to use it reliably.

One of the problem with a virtual machine is that it will mark all files in the virtual disk as changed on the moment of boot.

This might cause Superduper to always backup everything. Not necessarily a bad thing though.

When the VM runs at the time of running a backup, the virtual disk can change while it is copying the disk. This might cause real problems and could even end up making your backup of the virtual disk being corrupt. Superduper can't do anything about that as it isn't aware it is backing up a VMware Fusion virtual disk, for that tool "it's just a bunch of files".

My software uses VMware Fusion's automation techniques to see if the VM is running and if it is then it will make a temporary snapshot so that it can copy out the data without it being able to change. Once the copy if complete it will commit that temporary snapshot and make a few small changes so that the backup is similar to a suspended VM on the moment of taking the backup.

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Wil