CentOS - Jul 2007 - VMWare hiccup on CentOS 5, 2.6.18-8.1.8

For reasons which escape me, my VMWare Server, which was working perfectly a
week ago when I shut down my machine for vacation, no loner comes up with
the formerly working Windows XP system - it just stays in the small window
where it normally boots and does nothing.

The vmware serverd log shows nothing particularly interesting, and I have
reconfigured the vmware twice to try and fix this (which interestingly
enough could not find the vmware modules for my os either time).

I am running CentOS 5.0 with all the latest updates through this morning,
plus a 2.6.18-8.1.8 kernel with NTFS file system support compiled in as a
module, and vmware server shows this:

$ vmware -v
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0:
no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
VMware Server 1.0.3 build-44356

(Not sure what that note about libpng12 means....)

Here is the server log's tail:

Jul 30 17:57:48: app| SP: Retrieved username: mhr
Jul 30 17:57:54: app| Adding to list of running vms: /F/vmware/Windows XP
Professional/Windows XP Professional.vmx
Jul 30 17:57:54: app| Attempting to launch vmx : /F/vmware/Windows XP
Professional/Windows XP Professional.vmx
Jul 30 17:57:55: app| New connection on socket server-vmxvmdb from host
localhost (ip address: local) , user: mhr
Jul 30 17:57:55: app| Connection from : /F/vmware/Windows XP
Professional/Windows XP Professional.vmx
Jul 30 17:57:55: app| Setting up autoDetect info.
Jul 30 17:57:55: app| VMServerdConnect: connecting to /F/vmware/Windows XP
Professional/Windows XP Professional.vmx
Jul 30 17:57:55: app| Connected to /F/vmware/Windows XP Professional/Windows
XP Professional.vmx

It is now 18:43 and the window is still hung.

Any suggestions or clues?  This is the first glitch I've had with vmware
server on CentOS 5.


Thanks.

mhr
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Any chance your filesystem is full?  That same thing happened to me 
awhile back on a different OS and that was the problem.

Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
> For reasons which escape me, my VMWare Server, which was working 
> perfectly a week ago when I shut down my machine for vacation, no loner 
> comes up with the formerly working Windows XP system - it just stays in 
> the small window where it normally boots and does nothing.

On Mon, 2007-07-30 at 18:45 -0700, Mark Hull-Richter
wrote:
> For reasons which escape me, my VMWare Server, which was working
> perfectly a week ago when I shut down my machine for vacation, no
> loner comes up with the formerly working Windows XP system - it just
> stays in the small window where it normally boots and does nothing. 
> 
It turns out that this was the same problem I was seeing on CentOS 4.4
right before I upgraded, only rebooting does not help.  I have booted to
a plain vanilla 2.6.18-8.1.8 kernel and even went back to the
2.6.18-8.1.6 kernel where this was working before, so it clearly is NOT
a CentOS problem (never thought it was!).

The logs are rather unrevealing as to what happens - the guest just
starts to boot and hangs with a black screen (and the play button
blinking).  It has been suggested (elsewhere and before) that I create a
new VMWare guest OS, attach the current non-working drive to it and try
to clean it up from there.  This might work and I will try it, but I was
wondering if there was anyone else out there who might have an idea what
this could be.

Thanks.

mhr