Can't clone - virtual disk in use.

[BillHicksRIP]

Hi. Got myself into a bit of a mess. I've got a W2K3 image on Workstation 5 that I've been using, shutting down, taking a snapshot off, and then restarting to add more software. I've got a stage where I want to make a full clone with everything installed and running. I had the image running and took a snapshot of the machine up and running as I wanted to quickly test something, then accidentally logged the server off that was running the image. No I seemed to be screwed. I can't clone the online copy, as it's an online copy. If I try to clone one of the previous offline snapshots it tells me I can't as 'one of the disks in this virtual machine is already in use by a virtual machine or snapshot'. I can't delete the online snapshot as it says the virtual machine is a template. If I revert to an earlier snapshot and try to clone it I get the same 'in use' message. Any ideas?

[N5BZ]

Try shutting down VMware, make a copy of the virtual machine outside of vmware, delete any .lck files in the copy's directory.

Bring up vmware and open the copy.

Quite often, when my host crashes, I am left with .lck files hanging around that give me error messages about virtual disks in use. Deleting the .lck files usually fixes the problem

-bz-

[admin]

BTW, if you want to delete that powered-on snapshot, you can temporarily disable the template VM mode (under VM > Settings > Options > Advanced). If it's likely someone else on the network might open the same VM and remove other snapshots in that brief window, you should temporarily restrict network access to that VM first too.