I had bought VMware Workstation 7 many years ago and was using it since 2015 on a host system running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. The guest system was Windows XP 32bit. Everything worked fine until I upgraded my host to Windows 10.
I had to remove VMware Workstation 7 because Windows 10 said it wasn't compatible!
Ok. Since the only thing I wanted is keep using the old VM that was created with VMware Workstation 7 I downloaded the latest VMware Player 16. However it refuses to run my old VM that was created many years ago with VMware Workstation 7!
I was also wondering what will happen to my old license of VMware Workstation 7, if I can upgrade to a later version maybe.
But my main concern is how do I run that old VM created under VMware Workstation 7?
I don't see a reason why the VM shouldn't work. Please provide more information about the issue, i.e. error messages, log files, ... to find out what's causing the issue.
One reason I can think of is that the VM may have been suspended with the old version. In this case you'd see a .vmss, file in the VMs folder. Deleting this file may already solve the issue. Please note that deleting the file will cause a hard reset, comparable to pulling the power plug on a physical system, so ensure that you have a backup of the VM's files, so that you can restore the current state.
Thank you very much for replying and welcoming me.
There is no .vmss, file in the VMs folder
Basically what I do is start the VMware Player 16, go to 'Open Virtual Machine', I then go to the folder where the VM is and try to open the vmx file (Windows XP Professional.vmx). Immediately I get the message "Failed to open virtual machine: Error while loading this virtual machine's policies: VMDB failure."
It doesn't even start to write a log file. There is no log file with today's date. It looks to me like it does not even try to load it. The message comes instantly.
I even tried double clicking on the vmdk file with the same name and I get the message "Error while opening the virtual machine. VMX file is corrupt."
I have not changed anything in the folder of the vm. This vm has been working for years until I upgraded to Windows 10 on the host. The Windows 10 installer forced me to uninstall VMware Workstation 7. After completing the Win10 upgrade I installed the VMware Player 16 (because I figured I should attept to reinstall VMware Workstation 7 because of the incompatibility wih Windows 10)
If it helps here is the full content of the vmx file:
Can you please delete the "policy" lines from the .vmx file to see whether this helps? In case it was a restricted VM there may also be a policy (.vmpl) file in the VM's folder. It may be necessary to delete this too.
That said, please make sure that you have a backup of the VM's files to be able to revert to the current state in case something doesn't work as expected.
