I had a VMWare Fusion crash today with a Windows virtual machine running. When I tried to bring it back up though I got a “Failed to Lock the File” error. Restarting VMWare didn’t fix it, rebooting didn’t fix it. After a quick search I found an article on a similar issue with the Windows version of VMWare.

They suggested locating and deleting the .lck file in the virtual machine folder. I figured I’d try this, even though my situation was a bit different. To find the .lck files in OS X you will need to look inside the VMWare package. Simply right click on it and click “Show Package Contents”.

There were 3 .lck files inside my package, I could not get VMWare to open the virtual machine until I had deleted all 3. After doing so it worked perfectly fine. There does not appear to be any data loss except for what wasn’t saved prior to the crash.

Possibly related posts

• Shrink A Virtual Disk Size With VMWare Fusion
• Switching Video Cards on Your Macbook Pro
• Accessing & Converting Blindwrite Disk Images
• Snow Leopard Thus Far
• Is Mac Really Better than Windows?

Posted on January 25, 2010 at 9:58 pm
http://blog.stillaslife.com/software/vmware-fusion-failed-to-lock-the-file/
http://blog.stillaslife.com/software/vmware-fusion-failed-to-lock-the-file/trackback/
Categorised under : Software
Tagged with : Fusion , mac , OS X , virtual machine , VMWare , Windows