VMWare Woes

Posted by Steve Hanna on July 11th, 2007 filed in Mostly Worthless, Technical

I’ve been doing a lot of development in the windows kernel. I use a virtual machine on top of my windows box to do all of my development because it saves a lot of time. I can quickly revert to snapshots, remotely debug with WinDbg over a named pipe and completely reinstall the machine quickly if I manage to destroy it.

I came across an error today that I had not seen before. I left my office last night in the normal manner, stop what I am doing and lock the machine so that I can come back in the morning and start working as soon as possible. However, today my machine would not even prompt me for a password when I returned. After a few minutes of swap to disk, swap to ram, ad nauseum, I decided to reboot the machine. When I started VMWare to begin working on the LSP component of my suite, I was greeted by the error “This virtual machine appears to be in use.” Well, clearly it was not because I just rebooted. After some poking around in the oh, so originally named, “My Virtual Machines” folder, I found the culprit.

There were lock files remaining, “Windows XP Professional.vmx.lck”, so I just renamed it to “Windows XP Professional.vmx.lck.old”. Now unless you are a stranger to Linux, this is a fairly common practice, but in Windows, other methods are usually used for system wide locks.