No more shared folders and no more access to USB drives on virtual Linux machines

[Volker6619]

Hello community,

I am running VMware workstation 15.5 pro on a Linux Mint 18.3 Desktop computer, all with the latest updates installed. I have a virtual Windows 7 and two virtual Linux Mint 19.3 machines installed, the Linux machines do have the open-vm-tools installed, the Windows 7 machine comes with the VMware tools, all with the latest updates as well.

Until a few weeks back, I was able to access the shared folders and USB drives from the Linux machines, but this is no longer possible. However, the Windows 7 machine still has these abilities. I have reinstalled the Linux machines back and forth and the same with the open-vm-tools, but to no avail.

Has anyone else come across this phenomenon and could maybe already find a fix? Then I would love to hear about it.

Thank you,

Volker

[Mits2020]

Just to clarify, which 15.5.x version of Workstation do you run on your host? And are you sure you didn't upgrade the Workstation version since shared folders worked, or did this start happening after you upgraded to 15.5.5?

Also, when you create a new shared folder (different from the existing ones), does this work or not?

[Volker6619]

Thanks for the input!

I am not sure when it stopped working as I don't use shared folders on the Linux machines regularly as I usually move files by drag and drop, which also stopped working. Because of that, I tried to use the shared folders and found out they don't work any more either. So I tried to move files through USB-sticks/drives only to find out they also were not working any longer.

I tried to add new shared folders but without any success. Strange...

Volker

[Mits2020]

Can you verify that you have the packages open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-desktop installed in Synaptic Manager?

If they are not, you should install them.

If they are, you can try re-installing them.

You can also install them in the terminal:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop -y

[Volker6619]

Yes, I do have both packages. I removed and reinstalled them but no change at all. Drag&drop and shared folders work with my Windows machines (7 and 10), but not with my Linux Mint machines. I also installed the latest Ubuntu and, you guessed it, it didn't work there. So VMware seems to dislike Linux?