I was lucky to get hit by a power outage today. Nothing like running around the house putting out blinking 12:00s. I thought that would be the worse of it – I was wrong. As my Mac powered on it started throwing errors about not able to mount drives, etc. Then I realized that some of my internal servers may not have survived the power outage.
As it turn out my main VMWare server machine did just fine – and it spun-up a majority of my VMs that I have running on that server. However, I quickly discovered that a crucial VM, my Active Directory-DNS-DHCP Win2K3 server, did not power up. No wonder I couldn’t hit any internal servers. Launching into VMWare Server console to launch the VM manually gave me the bad news – VMWare threw back an error of “Fail to lock the file” — the file being the VM.
A little Google search later, I found this blog article that seem to have the answer. Basically remove the lock files. The article mentions that the lock files end with a “.LCK” extension. In my instance, running VMWare server, the lock files have an extension of “.WRITELOCK”.
I moved the “.WRITELOCK” files to a temp directory and attempted to restart the VM and – SUCCESS.
I was so happy .. for 10 minutes then I got hit with another power outage.
-JT