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I recently took the step, formatting my main drive and installing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in place of Windows 7. I'm not too much of a stranger to Linux I use it frequently in work, but this one has me stumped.

In the course of setting everything up, I installed VMWare Workstation 9. However, when I tried to turn on my first imported VM, it gave an error:

Unable to change virtual machine power state: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to

I wanted to eliminate the possibility of an incompatibility, so I set up a brand new VM with a different OS but got the same error. Playing around with the settings yielded a different error:

Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to power on '(VM name)'. Transport (VMDB) error -14: Pipe connection has been broken.

I have played around with the VMX file and Googled extensively, also tried removing all the virtual hardware I could without any luck, I am simply unable to power on any VM's.

I looked through the questions and answers relating to this problem on this site and tried the suggestions, most of them did not apply, and none of them described accurately the problem I am experiencing.

Any idea what could be causing this?

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  • I recently had this problem. I solved it by rebooting my laptop =/. If that does not work, have you stumbled upon this? You'll need to delete a few files, besides editing the .vmx file (as you probably did).
    – Alaa Ali
    Jun 3, 2013 at 15:09
  • I have rebooted several times. And I tried that, too... Of course, it doesn't apply to a brand new VM, but I tried it on the old one. Jun 3, 2013 at 15:24
  • I'm getting this problem intermittantly with vmware 10 on Ubuntu 3.10. In my case, the VMs start, but then get disconnected from vmware workstation within a minute or so...and produce the same error messaging until I manually kill the VMX.
    – Dave
    Oct 22, 2013 at 13:24

1 Answer 1

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Stop all services used by VMWare(by using 'kill' and 'service stop') and also run the command:- vmrun list This will list all VMs running in the OS with their path. Then run the command:- vmrun stop Wait until the command executes and returns that 'VM has stopped...' Then restart your OS.(Optional but for automatically restarting the services that you have already stopped.) After restarting, start using your VMWare. It will work properly.

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  • Thanks for answering my 6 year old question! Unfortunately, the setup I had described in my question is long since gone, so I can't test out your answer, but if someone else tries it and it works for them, I will mark it as accepted. Apr 15, 2019 at 16:11

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