Sunday, May 16, 2010

Resuming a VMware Virtual Machine: Could Not Open /dev/vmmon

I was tweaking Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid).  One step I took was to clean out old entries from the GRUB menu.  This involved removing some old kernels.  That process may have caused a problem for VMware Workstation 7.  When I tried to resume a previously suspended virtual machine, I got this error:

Could not open /dev/vmmon:  No such file or directory.  Please make sure that the kernel module `vmmon’ is loaded.
One source recommended adding some extra lines to the VMware startup script.  I killed VMware and tried that.  I typed “sudo gedit /etc./init.d/vmware and added those lines at the start of that file, right after the end of the introductory comments.  But it didn’t work, and I wasn’t surprised; the code seemed a bit scrambled.  I closed Workstation and tried “sudo vmware.”  But that didn’t help either.  What did finally solve the problem was a simple command:  “sudo service vmware start.”  Then I started VMware and was able to restore my virtual machine OK.

4 comments:

Anonymous

Thanks that worked for me.
HP DV7 Ubuntu 10.04 Lucyd X64 running Vmware 8

Anonymous

Thanks, it worked for me too. Running VMWare Workstation 8 x64 on Linux Ubuntu Server 11.10.

But is there a way to execute this command automatically when starting VMWare from the menu?

Anonymous

thanks.. that's so helpfullllll
i'm on lmde

Anonymous

thanks, so simple but so time saving ;) take care