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cappellof
Contributor
Contributor

Problem powering on: "One of the disks in this virtual machine is already in use by a virtual machine or by a snapshot"

I have created a new VMX file to represent a virtual machine made up of 2 .vmdk files stored on a non-NTFS Windows remote filesystem.  I import this VMX file into VMware Workstation 6.5.5.  It sees the disk sizes correctly.  Then I take a snapshot of the VM before continuing.  I see it create two snapshot vmdk files on my local disk, in the same directory where the .vmx file is.  So far so good.  The snapshot files seem to point to the original remote ones.

When I try to power on this machine, I get the dreaded message: "Unable to open file "\\.myfs\img000001\carltest.vmdk": One of the disks in this virtual machine is already in use by a virtual machine or by a snapshot.", and I can't figure out why.

There is no VMware.log file generated.

There are no .lck files present either on the local disk or the remote filesystem.

Other facts:

If I don't create that initial snapshot, I can power on successfully.  But I don't want to write to the original .vmdk files, so that's not a good solution.

If I create a VM with only a single disk, I can power on successfully, even after taking a snapshot.

If I copy ONE of the remote files to a local disk and use it along with the other remote file, I can power on after taking a snapshot.

I have looked at all the I/O activity to the snapshots and original files when I try to power up, and don't see any failures.

Any ideas what's causing this problem?  Is there something buried on one of the snapshot files that links the two disk images together?

Thanks,

Carl

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cappellof
Contributor
Contributor

Interesting new fact.

After I take the VM snapshot creating a snapshotted VM and snapshotted disks, I can power up the resulting VM if I first delete the .vmsd and .vmsn files.  So I'm essentially running with snapshotted disks, but a VM that looks like it wasn't snapshotted.  That may be good enough for me.

Also, strangely enough, if I do the same exercise using VMware Server instead of Workstation, I can power on a snapshotted VM without playing any tricks at all.

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cappellof
Contributor
Contributor

The problem turned out to be my filesystem not returning a unique file id for a file like NTFS does.  So VMWare Workstation thought my two .vmdk files were actually the same file, and refused to mount both at the same time.  Makes sense now that I know

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