I had a problem where I couldn't shutdown my Windows XP under VMWare Fusion - it started shutting down and then just locked up. There doesn't appear to be any way to force a shutdown via Fusion.
My solution, via Google, was:
1. Force quit VMWare Fusion and vmware-vmw (password required) via the Activity Monitor.
2. Goto to the Virtual Machine (eg. Documents/Virtual Machines/XP) and "Show Package Contents"
3. Find the file ending with ".vmem" and move it to the trash.
4. Restart the Virtual Machine and all should be good!
Edit:
Well, it turns out there is an easy way to do this from the VMWare application itself. In the comments below, Ben from VMWare mentions that holding down the "Option" key while the Virtual Machine menu is open will change the "Shut Down Guest" to "Power Off". Nice!!
35 comments:
Another way to solve this is to open the Virtual Machine menu, then hold down the Option key to change "Shut Down Guest" to "Power Off".
If you select "Power Off", that's like pulling the plug from the power of the virtual machine, and it'll shut right off.
That's good to know. Cheers Ben!
Nice tip Ben! Worked for me.
Worked great for me as well! Thanks for the help!
I was having this exact problem and stumbled upon this blog when trying to find out how to fix it. Thanks!
I wonder why VMware made this feature so "secret".
I googled for an hour trying to find the solution to this problem, and was getting desperate. I can't believe how easy this is! Why couldn't VMware just make their menu a little longer and not hide this option? Anyways...
Thank you!!!
Thanks a lot. Cheers Ben!
Ben,
One more "Thank you"!
But isn't this a stupid way to shut down VMWare Fusion? Virtually pulling the plug seems guaranteed to corrupt the file system at some point.
I have had this problem w/ VMWare Fusion from the beginning of it taking forever (okay not literally, but several minutes) to shut down.
Thanks! 30 seconds from Google search to solution.
This was very helpful. Thank you.
Helpful here too -- thanks for the post!
Worked a treat - Cheers Mate!!
Thanks. Perfect solution to those locked up VM's.
You better hold down option key while in the 'virtual machine' menu, and the 'close option' will change to 'Shut down'.
You're my hero Ben! In some cases, windows will not respond to anything but a hard shutdown and that did the job!
James: You sort of missed the point. The tip posted here deal with shutting down the VM -- not shutting down VMWare.
And it's absolutely necessary. More often than not, the restart initiated by Windows Update hangs and I have no choice but to hit the kill switch.
Stumbled across this post when I was trying to figure out how to do that. Another thanks to Ben.
Thank you
Thank You
Thank You
I thought I had lost all of my information. Thanks to Ben I am back in business. By the way VMware doesn't seem to know anything about this and it only happened after I upgraded to the new version. I now have ver 2 back on my Mac.
Thanks again
Mike
such an easy fix, thanks man!!!
wow, thank you. the power off tip just saved me days of my life that would have been spent rebuilding my virtual machine from scratch.
also, in researching this problem i've come across the concept of snapshoting the virtual machine which i intend to do religiously from now on. thank you!
Awesome! Both methods very handy to know!
Many thanks - was stumped till I found your blog!
thanks ben...the option trick worked great for me too!
THANK YOU! I've been fiddling with this for 30 minutes and it was driving me bananas!
Great tip! I'd been going around in circles on this one. Win 7 had frozen on a 'Installing update...do not power off..." !
To quite everyone else here...THANK YOU BEN!!!
Hello!
This dont work for me, do you guys talking about the OPTION key on the keyboard? How long do i need to hold it?
10sec dont work :((
Regards
It should work straight away.
If I click on the "Virtual Machine" menu so I can see the "Suspend", "Restart" and "Shutdown" options, when I press the "Alt/Option" button these immediately change to read "Force Suspend", "Force Restart" and "Force Shutdown"
Thanks - this has been driving me crazy all day!
In the current version of VMware Fusion, the option-key option is Force Shut Down. Fusion puts up the dialog, Please check that you have shut down your guest operating system before powering off, with Cancel and Power Off. Clicking Power Off, leaves Fusion hung up as before.
Force Quit from Mac OS X, shuts down Fusion. When restarted, it is hung up at the same point. I managed to start Windows Task Manager; CPU Usage: 100%, VMwareUser.exe 50 to 70%. There is another user logged on (Switch User), but I can't get Task Manager to accept a click on Show processes from all users.
Latest version Mac OS X, latest version of Fusion, and latest version of XP, but I had just started Internet Explorer to get any Windows updates from yesterday.
As I reported, I could not get Fusion to Power Off. I told Mac OS X to Force Quit Fusion. Before trying the method in the original post, I restarted OS X. When I again started Fusion, it came up the XP virtual machine with XP shut down (probably power off state?). I started XP and it came up clean, with all users logged off and no applications running. But with no message that from XP that it did not like the way it had been shut down.
So, friends, if Shut Down and Power Off don't work, Force Quit and then try restarting Mac OS before trying the .vmem file removal method.
Thanks for this excellent site.
that saved me, thanks :)
it saved me, thanks :)
Brilliant! that was so useful...
Thanks guys, this post saved my sanity! Cheers Ben!!
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