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mraymushy
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Can't access any of my VMs after exiting VMWARE Workstation Pro 15.5.2

I'm honestly not sure what happened.  A couple days ago I built my vmware environment, which included 3 Windows servers, an Ubuntu server, and a Kali LINUX server.  All of the VMs were open horizontally within my workstation app and functional.  I clicked on the Workstation Icon in my task bar and noticed that each server had its own window.  I decided to close the two linux servers and after that I could no longer access these linux servers or get them to come back up where I could see their console.     Somewhere along the line I also exited Workstation Pro and said not to exit the VMs.    I just shut all of the vms down and now when I'm in Workstation Pro I can't access any of them.  I also can't edit their settings any longer.  I'm not sure what I've done to break this.  Here's a couple of screen shots.  I honestly have no idea what I've done to cause this.  The only thing I haven't done is restart the machine, which of course, I will do now.  🙂  I just restarted my computer and that hasn't made a difference.  Based on what I'm seeing, none of the VMs I created a few days ago and some I even used today, seem to be available to me to use.   I am new to this version of VMWare Workstation, but not new to VMWare.   I've not seen this before.  Please advise.

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a_p_
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Have the VM's folders been renamed?

You may check the registered VM's in the  "inventory.vmls" at "%APPDATA%\VMware".

To rule out file/folde permission issues, start VMware Workstation with "Run as Administrator" to see whether this works.

André

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mraymushy
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Are there things I'm missing from this post that would make people want to respond to it?  Log files?  

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haiweiz
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Try this step:

1. Close Workstation UI.

2. Navigate to your VM's directory, if there have sub-directory named as "VMNAME-vmrest.lck" and "VMNAME-vmx.lck", delete them and restart Workstation.

Try to open your VM again.

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mraymushy
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Thank you for the response, haiweiz, however, there were no directories named anything like this in my vmware directories.  I do have all my vms sitting at c:\vmware rather than the default directories.   But I checked c:\programfiles86\vmware\ directories and there were no files like this there either.  I am attaching a directory listing.  I do have a bunch of stuff in cache directories.  Don't know if that's related or not.

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a_p_
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Have the VM's folders been renamed?

You may check the registered VM's in the  "inventory.vmls" at "%APPDATA%\VMware".

To rule out file/folde permission issues, start VMware Workstation with "Run as Administrator" to see whether this works.

André

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mraymushy
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I think the one thing I like most about forums is I learn new things all the time from troubleshooting suggestions. 

I actually tried running as an administrator yesterday and it didn't make a difference.  However, just now when I tried, it worked.   It looks like I can now access my servers again.  There are no little red-x-circles on my vms any longer.    In fact, I just exited and ran without administrator rights and my VMs are available as well.   It fixed itself just as it appeared.  No clue what I did differently.  I did pull up the file you suggested and I looked at it, but other than that, I did nothing else.

I honestly hate resolving issues like this because I have no clue what fixed it.    Oh well, hopefully it is resolved for now.

I did exit workstation and go back in without Administrator Privileges.   I was able to start all of my windows servers, but my LINUX servers gave me a local permissions error (c:\vmware\vmname).  When I logged back in as Administrator, I was able to then load my LINUX servers as well.   NOt sure what the difference is there.   For that reason, I'll mark your response as the solution

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a_p_
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I honestly hate resolving issues like this because I have no clue what fixed it.

I can absolutely understand that!

What I assume is that it is an issue caused by NTFS permissions, i.e. file/folder permissions combination with file/folder owner settings.

What should resolve the issue is to grant the local "Users" group read/write permissions to the "C:\vmware" folder (and all of the sub-directories).


André