How to recreate a VMware Workstation VMX file from scratch

This morning I was having some home desktop issues so as a good little Windows user I decided it might be time for a reboot.  I suspended a work Win7 VM in VMware Workstation and then went about powering down everything else.  Once my desktop rebooted I went to fire up my work Win7 VM and received the following error: Line 1: Syntax Error on my .VMX file.

That’s not a really great way to start my day !!  So, I did a little googling as well as “Tweeting” around to see what I could dig up on the error.  Jase McCarty once again provide an invaluable resource and just continues to impress the hell out of me. He made some great suggestions as well as helped me through the process.  First thing he recommended was to stop using Windows Notepad, he suggested Notepad ++ to help with the editing.  So I opened up my .VMX file and this is what was in it:

Essentially the .VMX file had a ton of Twitter / Tweetdeck garbage in it.  I have no idea why, but this was not going to be a simple Editing of the file, this was going to be a complete new one !!  Once again Jase came to the rescue and we both jumped on ShowMyPc.Com and he took me through a quick way to get me back up and running.  I thought I would share it with others that may run into a similar issue.

First, open up VMware Workstation and create a new Win7 VM.

1) In VMware Workstation go to File – New – Virtual Machine

2) Choose Custom

3) – Pick the defaults and click next

4) To make this easy – just click “Install OS later”

5) Pick the OS that has the corrupted VMX file – in my case it was Windows 7 64bit

6) You can either name it the same as the old VM, or leave it and edit it later.

7) Change this if you happen to remember what you originally set it to, if not go with defaults

8) Same thing here – I happen to remember giving it 2GB so I adjusted it from 1GB to 2GB

9) Choose the network settings

10) Just click on Create a new Virtual Disk

11) Choose the type of disk – just pick the default

12) Just adjust this to 1GB – to keep the process quick.

13) Final step is to review – and then click Finish

14) – once it’s good to go, open up Windows Explorer and go to the Virtual Machine folder (its typically in your documents folder) – then open up the new VM Folder you just created, copy/paste the new VMX file into the old folder location

15) Once you have copy/pasted the new .VMX file into the old folder – right click on it and edit with Notepad ++

16) last but not least, do a “Find” on the VM’s name and edit it to match the old VM’s name.  Once you are done, right click on the VMX file and open with VMware Workstation.  It should load Win7 and be good to go.  My VM came up like a CHAMP !!  Right size Disks, right size everything.  Easy Peasy just the way I like it.

Thanks again goes to Jase for helping !!

@vTexan