Cannot create a VM in workstation pro 16.2

[pgaltieri]

My problem is I cannot power on a VM.

Here is what happened to get into this state.  I had a VM running, and in the bottom right of workstation pro it displays the devices that can be attached to this VM.  All are currently marked with a red x indication they are currently attached to the host.  Four of these devices are external disk drives, all display "Seagate RSS Portable" when I mouse over them.  One of these drives happens to be the one that contains my VMs.  Since the mouse over does not display the drive label )why?) I ended up trying to mount the drive containing the VMs onto the VM.  This did not work well :-).  However, after restarting vmware I was able to access all of my VMs except one.  This one refused to start and displayed the following error:

Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to power on '/run/media/pgaltieri/SDNVIRTLAB02/VirtualMachines/VMware/VMs/f34-server-vm/f34-server-vm.vmx'.

I ran fsck on SDNVIRTLAB02 disk and there where no errors.  So I tried to create a new VM.  When I got to the Virtual Machine Name section the location was blank, even though I have the location configured in settings.  I complete the rest of the configuration and then it says "loading..." This continues for a few minutes and then display the VM info.  At this point if I try to start the VM so I can install the software I get the same error as above.

I have been creating VMs with Workstation Pro for several years and have never encountered this issue.

What do I need to do to be able to create a VM and start it?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.  I have attached the vmx file.

Paolo

[scott28tt]

VMTN has an area for Workstation Pro, a moderator should be along to move your thread there.

[wila]

Hi,

Check if there's not a vmx.lck folder and if there is, delete it and then try again.

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Wil

[pgaltieri]

I've tried that and still wont start.  As I mentioned I started the whole process from scratch having removed the entire directory associated with the old VM and I still can't get the VM to start.

Paolo

[wila]

Hi,

The vmx file itself looks fine.

I've seen this type of error when it was already running, not when you can't start it.

A vmware.log file from the vm folder might explain what is happening.

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Wil

[pgaltieri]

There is no log file in the VM directory.

Paolo

[wila]

OK.. try starting again and then attach the most recent vmware-ui.log file(s)?

You can find the location of that file in the Help -> About page.

--
Wil

[pgaltieri]

Here's what's interesting the problem is related to the name.  If I create a VM named f34-server-vm, no matter how many times I do, this VM will fail to start.  If I create a VM with a completely different name then the VM powers up and boots the iso image.  I've made sure the f34-server-vm directory is removed  when I re-create the VM and it still does not start.  I have attached the vmware-usbarb from /var/log/vmware.

[pgaltieri]

Here's the log file you wanted

[wila]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay.

I have looked at the vmware-ui.log and I'm sorry to say that I have no idea.
Perhaps someone else out here can help in troubleshooting this.

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Wil

[pgaltieri]

I don't know for sure what happened, but after rebooting the system everything started to work.  I don't know why rebooting would fix the problem.  Thank you for taking a look.

Paolo