"Dictionary problem." Error with VMPlayer

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Solution 1

For the record I got this fixed by taking backups of my caches directory, vmsd, vmxf, vmx, nvram files and copying them over the files that I had. I guess some of them had been corrupted.

Solution 2

Have seen this in relation to snapshots creatiung this error. There are several threads in VMware community sites. VMware community Another thread here speaks to it as well VM Discussions

10,266

George Mauer

I have been a senior developer with a focus on architecture, simplicity, and building effective teams for over ten years. As a director at Surge consulting I was involved in many operational duties and decisions and - in addition to software development duties - designed and implemented an interview processes and was involved in community building that saw it grow from 20 to about 350 developers and through an acquisition. I was then CTO setting up a dev shop at working closely with graduates of a coding bootcamp on both project work and helping them establish careers in the industry. Currently a Director of Engineering at findhelp.org your search engine for finding social services. I speak at conferences, have mentored dozens of software devs, have written popular articles, and been interviewed for a variety of podcasts and publications. I suppose that makes me an industry leader. I'm particularly interesting in companies that allow remote work and can check one or more of the following boxes: Product companies that help people in a non-trite manner (eg I'm not super interested in the next greatest way to get food delivered) Product companies that make developer or productivity tooling Funded startups that need a technical co-founder Functional programming (especially Clojure or Elixir) Companies trying to do something interesting with WebAssembly

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

George Mauer almost 2 years
I'm pretty new to using vmware virtualization (been a virtualbox user) so I'm hoping you guys can help me out. I recently got an external usb disk containing a vm for a client, downloaded vmplayer, set it up with "Open a Virtual Machine", ran it, easy as pie.

After working with it a bit this morning, I shut the VM down and now trying to start it back up again I get this:

I tried removing the vm from my library, now it happens whenever I try to add it back in. In the meantime, I can still access other virtual machines so it seems like the problem might be with the virtual disk.

So two questions:
- This is obviously not a very helpful error message. Where can I go to get more information? My Application EventLog doesn't contain anything from VMWare.
- What steps can I take to fix the problem?
Edit: A couple more pieces of information.
- I did not take any snapshots. I don't think VM Player even has that ability.
- I have a zip file of (what I assume) is the state of the VM when it was sent to me. I cannot unzip it as it is huge and simply requires more HD space than I have available but I did extract the vmx file and examine it. Other than the UUIDs and the fact that mine reads cleanShutdown = "FALSE" they are identical.
- The log contains the following lines
  
  Jun 23 10:11:18.080: vmx| SNAPSHOT: SnapshotConfigInfoRead: Unable to load dict from 'E:....\MachineName.vmsd'.
  
  Jun 23 10:11:18.080: vmx| SNAPSHOT: SnapshotConfigInfoRead failed for file 'E:....\MachineName.vmx': Dictionary problem (6)
  
  Jun 23 10:11:18.082: vmx| SNAPSHOT: Snapshot_TimeStampTiers failed: Dictionary problem (6)
George Mauer about 13 years

Hmm, I have not taken any snapshots, I was not even aware that with Vm Player you could do this
Dave M about 13 years

I was thinking the VM you received may have had one with the VM
George Mauer about 13 years

It might have, but I haven't done anything with them!