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Restarting VmWare guest if shutdown is not successful

Today I run into the problem where one of my Vmware guests with an installed Windows XP wasn’t able to shutdown. The only option users have via the UI is to put the machine into sleep. But that doesn’t help at all. I wanna have a running XP box again. Waking up from sleep still shows the same problem: “Windows is shutting down…”. So how someone can kill this instance to restart it like a manual hard boot?

The first thing I tried was to kill the Vmware application via the Activity Monitor of OS X. But I wasn’t successful. After I’ve started VmWare again the same screen as above was displayed for the XP machine. What a bummer! So how to process? After searching a while on Google I found the solution. You simply have to kill the process which handles this machine. Grep the output of ps to get a list of all Vmware related processes:

henrik$ ps -ef | grep vmware
0 31737 1 0 0:00.00 ?? 0:00.01 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-dhcpd -cf /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf -lf /var/db/vmware/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet8.leases -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet8.pid vmnet8
0 31745 1 0 0:00.00 ?? 0:00.00 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-dhcpd -cf /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet1/dhcpd.conf -lf /var/db/vmware/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet1.leases -pf /var/run/vmnet-dhcpd-vmnet1.pid vmnet1
0 31776 1 0 0:08.81 ?? 0:11.93 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-vmx -E de -D h5VWrEgtEdEDLwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA= -# product=1;name=VMware Fusion;version=2.0.4;buildnumber=159196;licensename=VMware Fusion for Mac OS;licenseversion=6.0 build-159196; -@ pipe=/var/folders/w2/w2myuXRLE1q1Ex7puQAPYk+++TI/-Tmp-//vmware-henrik/vmxebfd750b90971fa0;readyEvent=6 /Volumes/data/vmware/Windows XP Professional.vmwarevm/Windows XP Professional.vmx
501 31781 153 0 0:00.72 ?? 0:04.42 /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/vmware -psn_0_14101874
501 31795 13404 0 0:00.00 ttys000 0:00.00 grep vmware

As you can see the process with the id 31776 is the one for the Windows XP guest. Run the following command to do a hard switch-off:

henrik$ sudo kill -9 31776

Now you can start the machine from scratch and it should be started as expected.

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