VMWare Fusion “Failed to Lock the File”
January 25, 2010Matt 2 Comments »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.
July 18th, 2010 at 1:35 am
Thank you! I am a complete novice at VMWare & had the same problem opening Windows. I found many other sites telling me to look for .LCK files, but only yours explained I had to select “Show Package Contents”. Life is good again!
July 23rd, 2010 at 11:59 am
Hey Melanie,
No worries at all, I found the same thing when I was looking for a solution, which is why I decided to write this! I’m glad it helped!