Problem with unencryption (and dumb user(

[JohnA]

Hi, I've got myself into a pickle with a Win10 VM on Fusion Player (12). I was attempting to upgrade it to Win11 but learned about the requirement for encryption and TPM and EFI BIOS.  To that end I encrypted the VM (no backups or snapshots taken!) then discovered that this also encrypted to .vmx file - meaning I can't change the "Firmware" setting to EFI.  And you can't add TPM unless it's an EFI BIOS. I also made the stupid mistake of using MBR2EFI to convert the disk to EFI mode thinking that might help.  It didn't and needless to say - the VM won't boot.

So plan would be to simply unencrypt the VM, but I don't have enough disk space allocated - so it fails.  I've increased the disk size in the VM's settings, but I guess it's unallocated as it still won't let me unencrypt.

Apart from calling me a plonker - does anyone have any ideas how I can unencrypt (thus being able to edit my .vmx) to add the "Firmware" parameter?

Thank you,

John

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi John,

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@JohnA wrote:

So plan would be to simply unencrypt the VM, but I don't have enough disk space allocated - so it fails.  I've increased the disk size in the VM's settings, but I guess it's unallocated as it still won't let me unencrypt.

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The error is that you don't have enough free disk space available at the host. Increasing the virtual disk space will make that worse even.

For encrypt/decrypt a VM's disk you need to have at least the full space of the virtual disk available as free disk space as it needs to rewrite the disk while still having the old copy available as well.

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Wil

[JohnA]

Hi Wil,

Thank you - makes sense. Freeing some host space resolved the unencryption issue.  For information, I found a .vmx unencryption tool on GitHub ( a Python script) which works really well and allows you to unencrypt, edit then re-encrypt a .vmx file.

https://github.com/RF3/VMwareVMX

So all sorted - thank you.

John