VMWare Workstation – The virtual machine is in use. Even can’t take ownership. – Fixed
I have Centos 4.6 operating system installed in VMWare Workstation 7.1.5. The host operating system is Windows 7. While I was working on this virtual machine, the system halted for some reason, and I had to do a hard boot. After restarting Windows 7, when I tried to open this virtual machine in VMWare Workstation, I got the error: ‘The virtual machine appears to be in use. Take ownership’. I clicked on ‘Take ownership’, it displayed a message ‘Can’t take ownership’ of this virtual machine’.
I couldn’t open the virtual machine.
How to fix the issue:
The virtual machine creates a lock file in a separate folder, while it is in use. In this case, the name of vmdk file was ‘Red Hat Linux’, so a lock folder is created by the name ‘Red Hat Linux.vmdk.lck’ and another lock folder is created by the name ‘Red Hat Linux.vmx.lck’. These folders are created within the same directory, that contains other virtual machine related files.
These two lock folders should be deleted, to open the Centos virtual machine in VMWare Workstation.
I deleted these two folders, tried to open the virtual machine and the issue got fixed.