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tjrob
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cannot share host folders with Linux guest

This is VMware Fusion 8.5.3 running on Mac OS El Capitan 10.11.6. The guest is Scientific Linux 7.3, based on RHEL 7.3.

After installation and "sudo yum update", the guest booted fine and already had open-vm-tools installed. But shared folders from the host could not mount.

open-vm-tools-desktop   x86_64   10.0.5-4.el7_3  
open-vm-tools                 x86_64   10.0.5-4.el7_3

Rebooting did not help. Disabling then enabling shared folders did not help. Removing and re-installing these RPMs did not help. Removing these RPMs and attempting to install from the VMware Tools CD-ROM did not work because it still thinks there is an instance of VMware tools installed, which is corrupted:

    Error: Unable to find the binary installation directory (answer BINDIR)

           in the installer database file "/etc/vmware-tools/locations".

How can I get shared folders to work? This VM is useless without them.

(I have many older Linux VMs that do share folders; one (Ubuntu 16.4) uses open-vm-tools, the others installed from the CD-ROM. I also have Windows and Mac VMs that share folders.)

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tjrob
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Yogesh S N from VMware support called; we opened a shared session and got it working. The steps were:

  * sudo yum remove open-vm-tools

  * sudo yum install gcc-c++.x86_64

  * sudo rm -fr /etc/vmware-tools

  * install VMware tools from CD-ROM (as usual)

We do not understand why /etc/vmware-tools remained, and it was what caused the failure when I tried this earlier. Removing it got the VMware tools to install from CD-ROM, and they work.

Thanks to VMware support for a timely and successful resolution of this problem!

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tjrob
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Yogesh S N from VMware support called; we opened a shared session and got it working. The steps were:

  * sudo yum remove open-vm-tools

  * sudo yum install gcc-c++.x86_64

  * sudo rm -fr /etc/vmware-tools

  * install VMware tools from CD-ROM (as usual)

We do not understand why /etc/vmware-tools remained, and it was what caused the failure when I tried this earlier. Removing it got the VMware tools to install from CD-ROM, and they work.

Thanks to VMware support for a timely and successful resolution of this problem!

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