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Monday, April 7, 2014

Installing VMWare Tools Fails

All I am doing is trying to do a simple upgrade/install of VMware tools.   vCenter says the VM does not have VMware tools installed Windows says it is installed.   

I try to uninstall but it fails with some message like "The feature you are trying to use is on a Network Drive... ".  It prompts me to locate the VMwaretools.msi in some windows\temp directory.  This is, of course fruitless.

So I try the installer with the same result.

On a whim, I open a command window and run setup.exe -h.  I didn't capture the window it lists the optsion you can manually add to the installer.  One of which is "/c" which says "Clean Installer Registry" or something like that.

So, this worked for me:

  • Attach the VMWare tools ISO from the vCenter client or just "Install VMWare tools" in the Guest Menu
  • Log into the VM (I like the console client, righ click on the VM and Open Console)
  • open a command window (start/run/cmd)
  • Change to the CD-ROM drive (In my case just "E:" and enter)
  • List the directory to be sure you see the setup.exe (dir *.exe)
  • Run the setup.exe with the clean option. setup.exe /c
  • Wait a few moments for a popup window indicating the registry is clean
  • Click OK
  • You can run the setup from the command window.  setup.exe
  • When it has finished the install, it will want to reboot, so go for it
Hopefully this solves you VMware tools install/uninstall issue too.

I am running VMware 5.1 and 5.5.  The original tools were installed on a 4.1 system.

Cheers!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Excelente, he podido solucionar el problema. Saludos!