Problem to boot-up a vmware virtual machine

You may face this problem quite easily when hard rebooting a server whose hosting vmware virtual machines

You have this message when restarting the VM:

Cannot open the disk ‘/…/* . vmdk’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason : Failed to lock the file

A lock prevent the VM to restart.

To solve this is here are the steps to follow :

• In case of Linux server, connect to server using a terminal client(putty for example)
• Then go to directory indicated by the error message
• Remove directories whose names are ending by .lck and having same name than your virtual machine. You should have 2 directories :
  • *.vmdk.lck
  • *.vmem.lck
• in case of linux server, this is done using those commands :
  • rm -Rf *.vmdk.lck
  • rm -Rf *.vmem.lck