You don't say what macOS version, what Fusion version, what Mac hardware you're running - and you've tacked onto a 12 year old post.
The place to look to see what might be going on is the vmware.log file contained in the VM's bundle. The "operation failed" error message can have a few causes - the vmware.log file may give a clue as to the operating system error code that was returned from the operation. If you post that, perhaps we might see something that can help us determine what the problem is.
If indeed this is some kind of hardware issue (the disk is returning errors when trying to read or write), you might want to try to copy the VM to another disk to see if you can boot it and do some kind of recovery within the VM's operating system. No guarantees though if the Mac throws errors while trying to copy the VM.
By any chance is your Documents folder configured to sync to the cloud using iCloud Drive, Google Drive, OneDirve, DropBox, etc? For iCloud Drive in particular, you must make sure that you are not storing your VMs iin the Documents folder if you have the iCloud Drive setting "Desktop & Documents Folders" turned on. In any case. storing VMs in locations that are cloud sync'ed is asking for trouble. Those VMs should be moved to another folder that's not being sync'ed to the cloud.
Or, do you have a third party anti-virus solution installed on your Mac, and if so, is it s set to scan locations where you've stored your VMs? AV scanners on the host operating system have a nasty habit of to mess up virtual machines.
I assume that you don't have any kind of backup for this VM - and I don't mean snapshots of the VM.
- Paul (Technogeezer)
Editor of the Unofficial Fusion Companion Guides
