Troubleshooting Startup of Fusion 4.1, on Mac OS 10.7.5, Guest OS Windows 7 Pro, also looking to 'access data contained within the Virtual Disk File / VMDK

[fidelity]

The VM will not start, the error at startup, states "the operation on the file "full path to the primary VMDK"

failed.

The Primary VMDK is present, and is 250GB, there are (2) additional VMDK files, which are named -00001 and -00002,

and it is trying to start from the -000002 vs the primary, these were 'snapshots' which where attempted to be created,

not 'restored to' which I believe failed.

I am not as concerned about starting the VM as much as hopefully being able to access the data/documents within

the VMDK and I would have thought this was possible my Mounting it somehow, or importing/exporting whatever

might be possible.

How can I troubleshoot this further, either from a 'starting the VM" or "accessing the data in the VMDK file" ?

I did find folders/files with LCK in the extension, and I did create another FOLDER and I MOVED those folders

and files there, no change in startup.

The Physical Hard Drive itself, appears to be "ok" it passes the MacOs Disk check and Repair efforts w/o error.

The primary VMDK file itself, appears to have some sort of corruption, and if I attempt to copy the file elsewhere, it gets about 95%

through and then states there is an error copying and then stops.

There are no backups of the Virtual Machine/VMDK files.

Upgrading the Mac OS and/or Fusion Software is possible if this allows for a potential solution,
I didn't want to do this yet in the event that created more issues than help.

PAID Support is available for this, thank you and please advise

[Mikero]

Hi there,

Quick fix:

Make a new Windows VM (fresh clean install, etc), add the old .vmdk as a secondary volume. Shows up in Windows as D:\

Otherwise, there are tools to mount the .vmdk to the Mac itself.

The error in question usually means there's a corrupt file. Happened more on spinning hard disks back in the day than it does today with SSDs.

The Physical Hard Drive itself, appears to be "ok" it passes the MacOs Disk check and Repair efforts w/o error.

I used to see this too. If you check your system.log for 'Input/Output error' that is indicative of a failing disk. IIRC, Disk Check only scans the file system, not the physical platter itself.

You'll have to add the descriptor .vmdk for the snapshot chain, so if -000002 is broken you can use Virtual Disk - 000001.vmdk.

Make sure you have a copy of the VM somewhere else just in case. Reading is non-destructive but if there's corruption you never know.

[wila]

Hi,

As soon as you open another vmdk as snapshot 2 in a new VM, AFAIK your snapshot 2 is destroyed.. beware what you do as your snapshot chain might be permanently damaged.

It is best to wait until continuum‌ has time to look at your problem

Meanwhile try to make another backup to an external disk.

I agree with Michael that your disk is most likely damaged irregardless of what OS X disk utilities thinks it is.

Not being able to copy a file on your disk really does point to physical hard drive errors.

One thing that might sometimes help is letting the machine cool down and then try to make a copy immediately.

edit: Quick tests with a small VM (MS DOS) and Fusion 8 appear where I connect directly to an older snapshot do not appear to destroy the snapshot chain. AKA there's a fair chance Michael is right and I am wrong.   Yet I still suggest caution if you value your data and only connect to the last snapshot if your snapshots contain valuable data.

edit again: Nope, once you write to the underlying snapshot (eg. write to snapshot disk 1 while there's also snaphshot2) you get a problem. Just realized that I forgot to change the disk in MS DOS. Good old MS DOS does nothing by default. Once I wrote a file to disk.. it had changed snapshot 1 and I had a problem in snapshot 2 that the original VM was on. I could not open snapshot 2 again and got the following error:

Eg:

The content ID of the parent virtual disk does not match the corresponding parent content ID in the child

Cannot open the disk '~/Documents/MS-DOS 62/MS-DOS-000002.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.

Module 'Disk' power on failed.

Failed to start the virtual machine

Windows will write on use, so my initial warning still counts that if the snapshot has valuable data be careful about connecting to earlier snapshots.

Adding as drive 😧 might be OK, that depends on Windows and if it does things like indexing and write out the index. Changing 1 byte is enough for the error above.

--

Wil

[ColoradoMarmot]

10.7.5 is ancient at this point (very out of support, and with known vulnerabilities) - upgrading is highly recommended), and hardware that old could easily be subject to a hard drive failure.  Have you checked for that?