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The-Corrupted
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-02-2021 09:24 AM

Failed to power on 'F:\WorkVM16\WorkVM16.vmx

 

Hi all,

Vmware seems to get wedged every once in a while. In this instance, I have a Ubuntu VM. I opened it yesterday, made some changes, shutdown, then didn't use VMWare for the rest of the day. I came back this morning and attempted to open the Ubuntu VM and got a "Failed to power on 'F:\WorkVM16\WorkVM16.vmx'" error. It's possible to work around this issue by going to the powershell and killing all vmware processes or rebooting your computer. The issue with the first workaround is that it seems to break certain networking options for the VM.

My question is: Why does this keep happening? I haven't been able to pinpoint what I've done to get it into this state but it happens often enough that it's starting to become a problem. The error doesn't explain why it failed to start and it doesn't appear to be writing an error out to the log so all I can do is speculate as to what has broken.

OS: Windows 10 Pro ( build 19042.844 )

VMWare Workstation 16 Pro - version 16.1.0 build-17198959

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The-Corrupted
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-16-2021 01:53 PM

Well, I never got an answer and this is still a problem. The solution I found for this that doesn't mess up networking is to kill all vmware processes and then restart the services. Because I need to do this every 24hrs I've written a simple and slightly buggy powershell script to do this.

 

param (
    [string]$action = "restart"
)


switch($action) {
    "restart" {$command = "Restart-Service"}
    "stop" {$command = "Stop-Service"}
    "start" {$command = "Start-Service"}
    DEFAULT {exit}
}

if ($action -eq "start" ) {
    Invoke-Expression "$command -Name VMwareHostd"
    Invoke-Expression "$command -Name VMnetDHCP"
    Invoke-Expression "$command -Name VMUSBArbService"
    Invoke-Expression "& $command -Name 'VMware NAT Service'"
} else {
    Stop-Process -Name vmware -force
    Stop-Process -Name vmnetdhcp -force
    Stop-Process -Name vmnat -force
    Stop-Process -Name vmware-authd -force
    Stop-Process -Name vmware-hostd -force
    Stop-Process vmware-usbarbitrator64 -force
    Invoke-Expression "$command -Name VMUSBArbService -force"
    Invoke-Expression "$command -Name VMwareHostd -force"
    Invoke-Expression "$command -Name VMnetDHCP -force"
    Invoke-Expression "& $command -Name 'VMware NAT Service' -force"
}

 

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