Vmware Workstation - Cannot open disks xxxx or one of the snapshot disks it depends on

Question

I'm running Centos7 using Vmware workstation on windows 7 laptop. All was well until I restarted my laptop this morning & my VM started complaining as below

The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created. The content ID of the parent virtual disk does not match the corresponding parent content ID in the child

Cannot open the disk 'C:\Users\<user>\Documents\Virtual Machines\CentOS 64-bit\CentOS 64-bit-000003.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.

Module 'Disk' power on failed.

Failed to start the virtual machine.

Below is the image of the folder containing the VM & the image of the VM itself.

I've looked through the vmware log & found the disk ID

2016-03-21T15:56:15.685+13:00| vmx| I125: DISKLIB-LINK  : Opened 'C:\virtmac\CentOS 64-bit.vmdk' (0xe): monolithicSparse, 419430400 sectors / 200 GB.
2016-03-21T15:56:15.685+13:00| vmx| I125: DISKLIB-LINK  : DiskLinkIsAttachPossible: Content ID mismatch (parentCID b0f614a0 != a0549cb5) 

Solution 1

One trick, as per this is to look at the main .vmdk of the guest that is having the problem. For example, in one case that I saw, the guest was using a previously created parent's drive under a new location.

In my case I had the .vmdk mounted in another guest as well and that causes this kind of problem routinely.

So to solve this, for example in my case: in the .vmdk I saw that the parentFileNameHint was set to another location. I then went to this other location, copied the CID and then went back into the problem .vmdk and pasted this CID into the parentCID field that was not correct. After doing this the guest booted right up again.

Solution 2

Solution to this problem is very elaborate

basically your base image was expanded or is corrupt

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1007969

if you are not familiar with the instructions mentioned above, walking you though them would be very time consuming and beyond what we can do here on superusers

Comments

[usert4jju7]

Hello Sean - Thank you very much. The same problem persists.