Troubleshooting Fusion virtual machine startup issues

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to resolve common virtual machine startup and shutdown issues for Fusion.

Symptoms:
When booting up the VMware Fusion virtual machine, you encounter one of the following symptoms:

• The virtual machine does not start
• You see one of these errors:
   
  • "Operation on file <xxx> could not be completed"
  • "Operating System Not Found"
  • "VMware Fusion cannot connect to the virtual machine. Make sure you have rights to run the program and access all directories it uses and rights to access all directories for temporary files."
  • "Transport (VMDB) error -14: Pipe connection has been broken"

Note: For additional symptoms and log entries, please view the Related Information section.

Environment

VMware Fusion 6.x
VMware Fusion 1.x
VMware Fusion 4.x
VMware Fusion 3.x
VMware Fusion Pro 11.x
VMware Fusion 7.x
VMware Fusion 2.x
VMware Fusion 11.x
VMware Fusion Pro 12.x
VMware Fusion 10.x
VMware Fusion 12.x
VMware Fusion 5.x

Resolution

Be sure to validate that each troubleshooting step is true for your environment. Each step provides instructions or a link to a document or another article to eliminate possible causes and take corrective actions as necessary. As the steps are ordered in the most appropriate sequence to isolate the issue and identify the proper resolution, please do not skip any step.

 

Caution: After each step, power on the virtual machine.

 

1. Restart the Mac OS X machine.
    
2. If the Fusion application itself does not start, you may have to reinstall it. For more information, see How to Troubleshoot Fusion startup issues (323160).
    
3. Download and install the latest version of Fusion from the Broadcom support website. For more information, see Download and Install VMware Fusion (315638).
    
4. Confirm that the virtual machine has no lock files. For more information, see Investigating virtual machine lock files in Fusion (303398).
    
5. Confirm that the virtual machine is not in a corrupted suspended state. For more information, see Fixing an unexpected signal 10 error in Fusion (302479).
    
6. Confirm that your user account has the necessary permissions to open and write to the virtual machine bundle. For more information, see Investigating permissions for Fusion virtual machines (330655).
    
7. Confirm that your virtual machine has no corrupt or missing files. For more information, see Verifying Fusion virtual machine file integrity (302482).
    
8. Confirm that there is enough disk space for your virtual machine. For more information, see Verifying sufficient disk space for a VMware Fusion virtual machine (303389).
    
9. Confirm that your virtual disk is not corrupted. For more information, see Repairing a sparse virtual disk in Fusion (303388).
    
10. Confirm that the Mac's file system is intact. For more information, see Performing a disk repair in Mac OS (344575).
      
11. Confirm that the Mac OS is healthy. For more information, see Verifying the health of an operating system (328845).
      
12. If this is a Boot Camp partition, see  A Boot Camp virtual machine fails to power on with a disk error (344568).

Additional Information

You experience these additional symptoms:

• Cannot boot the virtual machine
• The virtual machine appears frozen

If the issue continues to exist after trying the steps in this article:

Collect the diagnostic information for VMware fusion and file a support request with Broadcom Support via Customer Connect. Please include this Knowledge Base article ID (1014534) in the problem description. For more information, see How to Submit a Support Request.