Windows 7 has no network connection after Fusion 4.1 upgrade

[WardC]

My Fusion environment with Windows XP and Window 7 virtual machines has been experiencing chronic Mac OS X beachballs, especially when both virtual machines are active.  When Check for Updates showed 4.1 was available and included performance improvement, I went ahead with the upgrade.

Fusion 4.1 itself and Windows XP seem to be running fine.  Windows 7 also appears OK, except it has no network connection.  Windows 7 Network Troubleshooting (not realizing it's running under Fusion) reports that the Ethernet cable is not connected.

I've tried the simple fixes I know:

1. Compare Fusion's WinXP and Win7 network settings -- the Networks Adapter > NAT settings appear to be identical.
2. Restart Windows 7.
3. Restart Fusion 4 and restore Windows 7.

I've searched this Community and the Knowledgebase for clues, but the posts refer to Fusion 3 or assume Windows troubleshooting skills that are beyond me.

What should be my next steps?

-- Ward

[hobbes444]

Same here with Windows XP Pro SP3. I upgraded the VMware tools, deinstalled, reinstalled, no dice. Even in NAT mode I don’t get any connectivity.

I really don’t want to reinstall my VM. Any troubleshooting ideas?

[hobbes444]

What I notice, is that when I go to “network adapter” settings, I can’t set the bridged mode to anything else than “autodetect”.

I mean, I can select “wifi” for instance, but if I click on “show all” to go back to the overview of all settings and then click on “network adapter” again, it is set to “autodetect” again.

With any of theses settings, the XP VM has no network connection and says “a network cable is unplugged”.

[hobbes444]

This is getting annoying. I uninstalled the VMware tools, reinstalled them, no dice.

I uninstalled/reinstalled Fusion (removed “/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion” and “~/Library/Preferences/everything-with-fusion-in-the-name”), no dice.

I reaaaally don’t want to reinstall my XP. I have a CD with SP1 only if I remember correctly, it will take ages to have it go through all updates…

[hobbes444]

I forgot: I also removed and re-added the network adapter device: no luck.

[srnhpp]

                               

I have MAC book air with  guest windows 7 but unable to connect WIFI in my guest OS.

[traceyt]

I am also seeing the same problem.  I just upgraded to 4.1 Fusion.  My Windows 7 VM is also my Bootcamp partition but it doesn't looks like that is the issue given that others are seeing the same problem.  Hopefully someone from VMWare will be able to help us.

[terraben · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Did you try to restart your Mac, or at least unlog and relog? I had the same problem and doing so solved it.

The problem seems to be (on the mac side) that the kernel extension named "vmioplug" from the older VMWare Fusion version could not be unloaded. Thus the new one couldn't be loaded and this avoided networking to work properly...

I had the following error in /var/log/system.log when launching VMWare Fusion 4.1:

Nov 19 23:37:48 Macbookabenua com.apple.kextd[13]: Can't load /Applications/Utilities/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/kexts/vmioplug.kext - a different version is already loaded.

I thus tried to unload this old extension manually (through: sudo kextunload '/Applications/Utilities/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/kexts/vmioplug.kext') but this didn't help. The extension could really not be unloaded.

But unlogging apparently unlocked something and allowed me to unload the kernel extension.

[WardC]

terraben wrote:

Did you try to restart your Mac, or at least unlog and relog? I had the same problem and doing so solved it.

Since Fusion 4.1 + Windows XP worked fine and only Windows 7 was failing, I focused my attention on this being a Windows 7 configuration problem.

Before reading terraben's note, I had to restart Mac OS X as part of installing unrelated software.  During a recent scan of a troubleshooting topic in the Fusion Knowledgebase, I'd noticed a recommendation to fully shutdown Windows and restart Mac OS X.  So I did that before restarting Mac OS X.

I'm pleased (and red-faced under my beard) to report Firefox on Windows 7 just displayed a Web page.

-- Ward

[DEAd1]

I am experienceing similar problems with 4.10 and Win7 under Lion, but none of the abovementioned approaches has worked.

Any other thoughts?

[hobbes444]

ok, rebooted the Mac and problem solved. Can’t believe I ddidn’t try this first.

[DEAd1]

I'm glad you're good to go.  However, that did not work for me - even with the guest OS shutdown completely first.

I tried all the steps in KB1016466 and still nothing.

Because I couldn't find the root problem, I had to restore Win7 from a pre-upgrade point to recover network access. 

All is well now, though.