VMWare: File not Found, on Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite

Question

I'm having trouble opening VMWare on my Mac pro OS 10.10. I didn't do anything, moving its files or anything. I just turned my Mac off before I went to bed last night, and then this morning, when I tried to open VMWare again on my Mac, it keeps giving me this waring:

File not found.

I'm very confused, I've important files storing on my Windows workspace and need to have it restored.

What I've tried:

• I've uninstalled VMWare on my machine, and re-downloaded and reinstalled it back, but, no luck, still the same warning. VMWare doesn't open at all.
• I've also restarted my machine, hoping that something magic can happen, but unexpectedly, no luck.

Answer 1

OK, question resolved after I went to the Tech Stop at my University. We just found that Windows 7 was somehow gone in my VMWare, then we opened Virtual Machine Library of VMWare, then re-installed Win7 into this VMWare, as this picture shows: http://postimg.org/image/blnk4x59z/ Now things are working fine.

Some other people might run into the same issue in the future, I don't know why this happened and nobody really knows what's going on. I called VMWare tech support, but they don't provide any help since I downloaded it for free from our CS department website. But our department tech assistance has never met this issue. So nobody to turn to.

But anyway, pretty simple to fix: Just re-install win7 in your VMWare, if you run into the same case as I did, by opening your Virtual Machine Library.

Answer 2

I experienced the same symptom after rebooting my Mac. SSun's answer helped me to solve it, but I think I can offer a bit of further insight.

VMWare Fusion was actually launching successfully, but when attempting to open a machine that was open at last quit, it fails to find the machine's files. I mis-interpreted the message as meaning that VMWare couldn't find an internal file and thought it had failed to launch. I got the same error when attempting to reinstall.

SSun refers to re-installing a guest OS. To be specific, one just needs to delete the reference to the virtual machine in VMWare (after dismissing the popup and you can access to the Window menu and open your virtual machine library); not reinstalling the actual guest OS. One can then recreate the reference by opening the machine via File > Open . Alternatively, resolve the root cause of the machine not being found.

In my case the root cause was that the virtual machine resided on a different hard drive to Mac OS and was referenced via a symlink. This hard drive had failed to mount automatically at boot up.

The same confusing error occurs when reinstalling because at the end of the install, VMWare launches automatically, triggering the symptom again.

Answer 3

I followed the steps from kb.mit.edu below to resolve this issue:

• Click OK to close the error message.
• Close the Virtual Machine. Click the red dot in upper left hand corner or execute the keyboard shortcut Command+W
• Follow the menu path Window >> Virtual Machine Library to open the
  Virtual Machine Library.
• Right-click on the thumbnail image for the VM or hold down the Ctr
  key while clicking on the thumbnail image for the VM. Result: A
  drop-down menu appears.
• Select Delete Result: Remove Virtual Machine dialog box appears, with options to Cancel, Move to Track or Keep File.
• Choose Keep File.

However after doing the above, I found out that you need to resart your machine for eveything to work properly, else the problem will still persist.

Answer 4

If you get this error – including after deleting a VM (ie, you cannot do anything inside the VMWare Fusion app to resolve this) – I found that the following will work, without reinstalling the app, deleting its preferences, or rebooting the host Mac, but at the tiny cost of having to re-add your VMs to the list of the available ones (a simple drag-and-drop operation):

• Shut down any running VMs that are functioning, then shut down VMWare Fusion.
• Trash the "~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmInventory" file
• Open the Activity Monitor app, search for "vm", and shut down everything with "vmware", "vmnet", and "vmrest" in its name. (Or do effectively the same thing in the Terminal, with ps aux | grep vm and then kill -9 on each of the appropriate process numbers, if you're command-line-oriented.)
• Go find your VMs in Finder.
• Restart the VMWare Fusion application.
• Drag each of your VM packages to VMWare and drop it on the now-empty left pane of the Virtual Machine Library window to re-add the the VM to the list.
• Test-start each of them to make sure you didn't break anything. [This is the paranoia option, here.]
• Restart VMWare to make darned sure it writes out new config files. [My trust level in this app is quite low of late.]