VMware Fusion: "Insufficient Permissions" and "File Already Exists"

These issues have been coming up more and more on some of the Macs in our Windows environment.  Yes.....I know what you are thinking.

Anyway, there are two issues that I will be addressing in this post.

The first is an error you might receive when trying to expand the hard drive space of a VMware Fusion virtual machine.

Unfortunately I do not have a screen shot for this particular error, but it shows something along the lines of "File already exists" when trying to increase space on the virtual machine hard disk space.

This is often caused if there was already an attempt to increase the hard disk space, but after the reconfiguring and expanding of the HDD the process fails with some sort of error, like a permissions error.

The reconfiguring and expanding process apparently creates some temp files within the virtual machine file.  Simply moving these to another folder (rather than deleting, should it accidentally break the virtual machine) should allow for the hard drive space to be modified again.  DO THIS ONLY WITH THE VM IN SHUTDOWN STATE AND VMWARE FUSION CLOSED/QUIT.

The contents files I encountered was a file with "converttmp" in the name, and a folder with "converttmp.lck" in the name.  I moved only the files containing "converttmp" out of the .vmwarevm file and restarted the space modification process as a local admin of the Mac.

(To access the virtual machine file contents, select the virtual machine file, right click/secondary click the file, and select "Show Package Contents")

The second error/issue I will address is this:

If you are receiving permissions errors, either while trying to modify the hard disk space of the vm, or when trying to launch/open the vm itself, it might look something like the below error.

The fix I have found for this is the following:

When logged in as the end user (the user with the permissions error)
- Open a Terminal session
- Change directories to the location of the virtual machine (ex: cd /Users/Shared/VMware\ Fusion/)
- Type/Enter:     sudo chown -R <username> <Virtual-machine-name.vmwarevm>
           For example, for an EU with username "joesmith" and a virtual machine file named "VirtualPC.vmwarevm," type:     sudo chown -R joesmith VirtualPC.vmwarevm

After pressing ENTER (or RETURN) the user should be prompted for a password for the sudo command, so they will need to enter their password in.

After this the user should be able to launch the virtual machine with no problem, and be able to change the space of the virtual hard disk (when the vm is shutdown) because they are now the owner of the folder and files.




Sources:

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/223803?start=0&tstart=0

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/338243