Good afternoon boys and girls! I know I usually complain about windows, but here goes… VMWare fusion is the topic tonight! I have had more issues than I can count. The latest one I found nothing online so I had to do some digging and experimenting.
I got a message that said the following when trying to start my VM… The state was saved, this turns out to be important… anyway the error text:
Unexpected signal: 10. A log file is available in “/Users/[my user]/VMWARE/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/vmware.log”. Please request support and include the contents of the log file. To collect data to submit to VMware support, choose “Collect Support Information” from the Help menu. You can also run “/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vm-support.tool” directly. We will respond on the basis of your support entitlement.
That last bit was especially encouraging! At any rate, I first got mad, then sad, then I decided to search online, not much there… I finally opened Text Wrangler and went to File -> Open Hidden and opened up the log file in the error message. Now … when you first open this puppy up, you are going to _____ your pants. Assuming you’re having the same issue 
Don’t worry it’s not all hex!
I found the following text close to the bottom :
Apr 13 19:06:04.040: vmx| FILE: ScanDirectory discarding M27100.lck from /Users/[my user]/VMWARE/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmem.lck’: invalid executionID.
Apr 13 19:06:04.043: vmx| MM: using ‘/Users/[my user]/VMWARE/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmem’ as a paging file
Apr 13 19:06:04.043: vmx| Opened paging file /Users/[my user]/VMWARE/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmem
Apr 13 19:06:04.043: vmx| Lazy Restore with prefetch of 2076 MB
Apr 13 19:06:04.151: vmx| Caught signal 10 — tid -1610160352
That looked awesome!!
I know from past experience that the vmwarevm file is really just a giant zip type thing that can be explored… also known as a package. So after some strife and debate… I decided to go to Finder… navigate to the vmwarevm file, right click Show Package Contents and scope things out. In the window that opened I saw a file that was named Boot Camp partition.vmem and also a /Users/[my user]/VMWARE/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmem.lck folder. After some debate… I deleted both… which wiped my saved state. At this point I’m 2 hours into this process so I just wanted my freaking VM to work!
Restart fusion, tried to restart the machine, it bitched that it couldn’t find the vmem … no ____ Sherlock I deleted it since you couldn’t load it or let me ditch it gracefully!!! Clicked ok to those messages, asked it to discard the state and start fresh. Problem solved!!!
God that was an ordeal!! Now… on to what I was going to do pre-explosion !