Macbook crash causes boot camp VM corruption

[sampablokuper]

I'm running Fusion on a Macbook 2.13GHz, 2GB RAM. I use Boot Camp with Vista Home Premium (up to date with all patches, and using Norton 360 for internet security, so should be uninfected). On the Mac side, I keep the system safe with ClamXav, the OS X firewall and FileVault. Since installing Fusion to enable me to use Vista without rebooting, it has worked fine until now.

I put the Macbook to sleep yesterday morning, with - as I recall - Firefox, Terminal and the Finder running but Fusion not running. Yesterday evening when I woke the Macbook up, it wouldn't show the login screen (showed only a black screen with mouse cursor), so I held the power button down. After restarting, I noticed that icons in some folders in the Finder were no longer sorted by name (they were jumbled up on top of each other) and that Firefox seemed to have lost its cookies and stored sessions.

I ran Fusion and tried to run the Boot Camp VM. I received an error message saying, '"/Users/sampablokuper/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmx" is not a valid virtual machine configuration file'. I get the same error message if I click the 'Settings' button in the Virtual Machine Library window.

I use Fusion daily, and I'm quite reliant upon it working. I'd be grateful for any help to get this problem resolved.

Many thanks,

Sam

[bgertzfield]

Hi Sam,

You can safely delete the folder from your home directory named Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp.

Restart Fusion, and try Boot Camp again.

Do you by chance use File Vault on your MacBook? If so, VMware Fusion 1.1 has a workaround for the Apple bug that can cause this kind of corruption.

[admin]

I noticed that icons in some folders in the Finder were no longer sorted by name (they were jumbled up on top of each other) and that Firefox seemed to have lost its cookies and stored sessions.

Sounds like some .DS_Stores (which has folder info) and ~/Library/ (where Firefox keeps stuff) got messed up. This might explain what happened to your Boot Camp VM.

Since Boot Camp virtual machine data is actually on the Boot Camp partition, you can just delete ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/ and let Fusion recreate it.

[sampablokuper]

Thank you both for your help. I'm now back up and running!