VMware Fusion Cannot to Connect to ANY Virtual Machine, why do all my VMs no longer work?

[edm00se]

On starting a VM, I receive the following error message: "VMware Fusion cannot connect to the virtual machine. Make sure you have rights to run the program and to access all directories it uses and rights to access all directories for temporary files." The worst part of it all is that it gives me that message for every single VM I try to run, including: WinXP, Win2k, Vista, Ubuntu 9.04, and Haiku alpha1. In addition, on creating a new VM and attempting to install an OS from scratch, it gives the same error once it starts the machine up.

I have checked around the community discussions and found that the best sounding answer to this was to uninstall then reinstall VMware. I've done this fully, three separate times. I've also tried removing the (3.0) beta I was using, back to the stable 2.0.5, then the 2.0.6 beta. Same experiences in all. Oh, I've also tried having OS X (through Disk Utility) Repair Disk Permissions, Verify and Repair it. I upgraded to 10.6 Snow Leopard not long after it came out, but it was working for me without any noticeable changes. I'm running out of ideas. Any help would be far more awesome than where I'm at right now.

[admin]

I'm not an expert but did you see this KB article?

Rick Blythe

Social Media Specialist

VMware Inc.

[edm00se]

Yeah, my user account has admin privileges. It did before and after this started happening.

[admin]

Have you tried the VMware Fusion cannot connect to the virtual machine. Make sure you have rights to run the program and access all directories it uses and rights to access all directories for temporary files. section of ?

[Mikero]

Have you done it like this?:

- Uninstall Fusion

- Reboot

- Install Fusion

- Reboot

- Test

The logs go back to Sept. 10th as well. I see some permissions related errors against /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion.

Can your user write to this folder?

[edm00se]

Yes, I've uninstalled, rebooted, and installed three times. My user can write to the folder. And I have checked out the section of FAQs and done the Repair Disk Permissions.

And the /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion directory (and all subs) have RW privileges for admin users (including my user account).

And as I've previously said, I can write to the folder.

[calvinhob74]

scratch sorry

[edm00se]

This is getting fairly frustrating. I've tried everyone's suggestions and gotten nothing. I really did love Fusion, but now that's dwindling. For now, I've switched to using the free Virtual Box which has let me use my existing virtual disks. It's going to be hard to switch back to Fusion unless it magically starts working again.

[void242]

same here!

I'm curious if you do use more than 1 partition, like I do.

Had tried all of the hints but nothing worked..

I even installed SL from scratch, but I won't move from my 2 partitions strategy (having my user home located on 2nd partition).

Finally switched to VirtualBox, too.

->

[void242]

edm00se, could you please try to add read rights to "everyone" on the folder where the VM is located?

in additon to that click the tiny lock, type in your admin password and then click the little gear and apply to all sub-objects.

[edm00se]

I could see that folder permissions for both /Library/Application Support/WMware Fusion and ~/Documents/Virtual Machines had listed permissions for "Everyone" as "Read only". I tried making "Everyone" have "Read and Write" permissions, applying to enclosed contents, for both those folders and still have squat.

[edm00se]

Quite frankly, I am astounded. It's been about three months since last I made (unsuccessful) attempts to use VMWare Fusion (last left in v2.0.6; had been using Sun's VirtualBox since in order to "get by"). Having made attempts in permissions so set "everyone" having read+write access to my Virtual Machines folder and the machines themselves (at the suggestion of void242), I've found that while this time those permissions were still there, I could suddenly access all my VMs and create new ones with no problem. I'm sure that something changed, obviously, but I have no clue what that is. If I were to guess, it would have to be something within Mac OS X which has "fixed" itself, but that is a guess. So as of now, I'm back up and running.

My setup:

Mid-2007 MacBook (MacBook2,1)

C2D 2.16GHz

3GB RAM

OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2

[JSABS]

Hey guys..

New to this forum..  I have just upgraded to Lion on both my Imac and MacBook Pro and have this same error come up on both..  edm00se have you since upgraded to Lion and if so did you have the same problem again?  Would be interested to know..

Cheers...