Fix for VMWare Virtual Machine ‘Failed to Lock the File’ Error

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Scary moment occurred last week when one of my virtual machines failed to start from VMWare Workstation. The reported error was “failed to lock the file”.
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A bit of searching revealed that I needed to delete the .LCK file in the Virtual Machine’s folder.(My location was c:\virtual machines\ubuntuintrepid\

The cause for this was that I had opened the virtual disk of this VM as a mapped drive on the host machine (TIP: very useful feature to get at files from the VM without powering it up – just right click on the .VMDK file in Windows Explorer, and you’ll see a couple of options there to map the disk as a drive). That drive was still mapped when trying to start the VM, meaning that the host machine was accessing the VM’s files.

Even you can rename the lock file with TXT extension in the lock directory.

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Topics: Virtualization

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Comments

thanks great help mate i deleted the lck files even though they were 0 bytes it still fixed the problem

Comment by ben on May 11, 2009 @ 12:20 pm

Thanks a bunch! I thought I was going to have to edit the hex code to get my vm to work….

Comment by MT on July 23, 2009 @ 5:25 pm

thanks so much, so much thanks ^^.. i love u

Comment by using on September 24, 2009 @ 6:38 pm

Thanks so much bro ! man i almost had a heart attack and then calmed down and googled the error… hehe

Comment by Cam on June 16, 2010 @ 5:46 am

Thanks that really helped me out.

Comment by Paul on June 30, 2010 @ 2:34 pm

thx dude i needed help on my virtual machine as i first got this error i was like
DANMIT but i searched how to get rid of this error and i found this so thx alot bro

Comment by joshua on June 23, 2011 @ 10:22 pm

Thanks a lot dude! I love you! :) )

Comment by thirdrix on September 12, 2011 @ 4:43 pm

Great, just what I need to save my work.
Thanks

Comment by Ale on September 13, 2011 @ 8:43 am

Thanks, it really helps !

Comment by Groumf on January 11, 2012 @ 1:45 pm

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