I've been using vmware player very happily for some time now to run a
linux image (Fedora ) on my Windows laptop.
This morning, I tried to open my fedora 7 image, but got a nasty error
dialog informing me :
"Error while opening the virtual machine:
"C:\attic\fedora-7-i386\fedora-7-i386.vmx" is not a valid virtual
machine configuration file."
It looks like the file (enclosed) is full of ^@ (0?) bytes.
I checked the .vmx file from my previous fedora core 6 directory
(enclosed) - it was a #/usr/bin/vmware script full of useful looking
"x.y.z = some-reasonable-value"-type expressions, so I am inclined to
believe the message.
I checked the vmware.log (also enclosed), which seems valid up to the
point where it was terminated with 1058 similar ^@ chars.
I have 885MB free in this disc partition, so it is possible that the
vmware image ran out of disc space as I was hibernating it, truncating
the log and config files and that the 885MB has appeared as a result
of some other activity on the laptop, but I did not see any error
message as I shut the image down, and I don't recall changing any
configuration that might lead to it needing to rewrite its config
script...
I was planning an upgrade to fedora 8 anyway, but would like to take
the data from the f7 image with me.
Is there an easy route ?
I was thinking that I might be able to mount the f7 fs straight into a
running f8 and copy the contents across, or set up a new f7 image and
copy pieces of the old one into it, or the new one into the old one in
order to get one running, but I have no idea what on the Windows fs
map to the relevant pieces of the Linux installation.
I'm also worried that other files may have been damaged by the same
event 
- with the potential for data loss. I haven't backed up for
some time. As you can see, it looks like most of them were written at
the same time. Maybe this is indicative of some catastrophic event
(lack of disc space?), during checkpointing (last significant event in
log) that killed the vm ?:
c:/attic/fedora-7-i386:
total 7780774
drwxr-x---+ 2 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 0 Dec 6 09:36 .
drwx------+ 8 jgosnell ???????? 0 Jun 5 2007 ..
-rwxr-x---+ 1 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 2001862656 Dec 4 23:41 fedora-7-i386-s001.vmdk
-rwxr-x---+ 1 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 2033319936 Dec 4 23:41 fedora-7-i386-s002.vmdk
-rwxr-x---+ 1 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 1592655872 Dec 4 23:41 fedora-7-i386-s003.vmdk
-rwxr-x---+ 1 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 2052456448 Dec 4 23:41 fedora-7-i386-s004.vmdk
-rwxr-x---+ 1 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 65536 Dec 4 23:41 fedora-7-i386-s005.vmdk
-rwxr-x---+ 1 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 8684 Dec 4 23:41 fedora-7-i386.nvram
-rwxr-x---+ 1 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 532 Dec 4 19:57 fedora-7-i386.vmdk
-rwx------+ 1 jgosnell ???????? 268435456 Nov 19 08:24 fedora-7-i386.vmem
-rwxr-x---+ 1 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 0 Jun 1 2007 fedora-7-i386.vmsd
-rwx------+ 1 jgosnell ???????? 18482496 Dec 4 23:41 fedora-7-i386.vmss
-rwxr-x---+ 1 jgosnell mkgroup-l-d 1249 Dec 4 23:41 fedora-7-i386.vmx
-rwx------+ 1 jgosnell ???????? 268 Sep 24 17:49 fedora-7-i386.vmxf
-rwx------+ 1 jgosnell ???????? 53666 Dec 4 00:33 vmware-0.log
-rwx------+ 1 jgosnell ???????? 49209 Nov 29 01:01 vmware-1.log
-rwx------+ 1 jgosnell ???????? 43267 Nov 24 12:36 vmware-2.log
-rwx------+ 1 jgosnell ???????? 55345 Dec 4 23:41 vmware.log
Any help with this would be much appreciated.
Thanking you for your time,
Jules
