VMWare workstation missing .vmsn snapshot


So one of my external drives started showing bad sectors. I did the smart thing and took a snapshot. Or so I thought. Turns out if VMWare cannot find your snapshot you cannot start-up an existing VM!
So I opened up the .vmsd file for the VM I am working on and compared it to another VM that had never had a snapshot taken. By removing the highlighted portion and saving it I was able to boot directly into my VM with no issues!
Very slick and sad to see there is no useful info on this currently out on the net. Especially from VMWare.
I hope this saves someone else's day like it did mine.

4 comments:

Tim said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tim said...

Thank you very much for sharing this very valuable information!
The picture made this post absolutely the best compared to the others that I found about this topic.

Best Regards
Tim

King Louie said...

Dude, you are the man! I had a 5th snapshot file corrupted and could not boot into it. This saved me hours!

GearHead said...

I tried to do this, but the remaining snapshot had as its parent one of the ones I deleted, so the VM would not start. I instead delete the whole vmsn file, and the VM started in the state it was in when I last used it. The Snapshot Manager showed that it had no snapshots at all. I think I could have knitted together the snapshot parent chain, but I didn't try it. What you did probably worked for you because you only had one snapshot. I'm really happy with the results. Thanks.