Black screen after login running on VMware Workstation when resolution too high

Question

I have Ubuntu 14.04 running in a VMware Workstation VM. While attempting to resize some partitions I decided I needed to get shared folders to work properly, so I clicked VM > Reinstall VMware Tools and followed the prompts to install VMware Tools. That worked and shared folders started working. After restarting, however, I now get a black screen after logging in. First I thought the whole VM was locking up but then I discovered that making the VMware window smaller than a certain size made the desktop appear, and making it larger again makes the VM go black. It also displays an error message:

Could not configuration for CRTC 63

What could be causing this and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

Somehow I came across this answer to an unrelated question, and it helped fix my issue. It seems as though when VMware knows it has VMware Tools installed it stops handling certain resolutions correctly. All I did was open my VM's vmx file (after shutting down the VM of course, since the file is overwritten on shutdown) and changed this line:

svga.guestBackedPrimaryAware = "TRUE"

...to this:

svga.guestBackedPrimaryAware = "FALSE"

And now I can maximise the VMware window again and the guest resizes correctly. Shared folders also still appear to work.

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More information about vmx files:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1714 https://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_learning_files_in_a_vm.html

Answer 2

This, among many other solutions didn't work for me. I ended having to uninstall vmware tools.

Steps:

1. Once at the black screen, press Ctrl + Alt + F1 to return to the Command Line
2. Run sudo /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl (it took a few minutes to finish for me, be patient)
3. Reboot

VMware Tools Uninstall Ref: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1014522