Error while opening the virtual machine: VMX file is corrupt. URGENT DESPERATE!

[kirkgarv]

Hello

I have been working on VM environment (VM WARE WORKSTATION 12 PLAYER) for many months with no problem. This VM was located on an external Hard DRive. Suddenly while trying to power the VM on I got this message " Error while opening the virtual machine: VMX file is corrupt."

I have no IDEA what to do! My tech expertise is limited to dowloading your software and running it. Thought everthing was going to go smoothly up till now! Please help!

I have just attached everything i found as a vmx file. I hope it helps....Please help me

[thasser]

The VMX file is the configuration file for your Virtual Machine typically located inside the virtual machine's folder.  If you can locate the .vmx file you can right click (or hold down control and click in Mac) and open in a text edit, like wordpad or notepad.  This will allow you to view the configuration in plain text. 

Please post the .vmx file's configuration on here and maybe we can find out what is wrong.

Good luck,

[kirkgarv]

thasser​ Please HELP

[thasser]

kirkgarv - I would love to help more but I will need a little more info on these items you uploaded. 

The vmware-vmx.txt file seems to be corrupt in the sense that I cannot open it in a text editor like notepad or wordpad.  With that said, what are these other files?

Regards,

[kirkgarv]

Anything I found in the Hard Drive as VM file.. i thought they might help

[a_p_]

The .vmx file has binary content, and the vmware.log file has some too at the end.

To me it looks like the external disk may have been insecurely removed, or may have some file system corruption.

What I would do is to backup the contents of the external disk, and then run chkdsk for the drive to see if it finds (and repairs) some issues.

To recreate a missing, or corrupt .vmx file from the logs, I posted a script at HowTo: Recreating a .vmx from the vmware.log file

André

[emusic]

I had the same problem but my VMX file had no binary content and visually was not corrupted. It looked as a valid ASCII text file in plain single-byte encoding, having no unusual attributes, was accessible and editable by any text editor.

But Workstation Pro 12.5.8 repeatedly said "VMX file is corrupt. Remove it from the library?".

Of course, I have recreated VMX file from the LOG file. But VMware definitely should provide an informative details, either in the message dialog or in a log file. Using such dumb and not-informative error message is absolutely unacceptably for a serious product like Workstation.