Although I had switched to Virtual Box for a while, I still have no choice but to open up some older VMs in VMWare to migrate or retrieve information from them. One such VM gave a similar error as above and in fact, it is not even a persistence VM. The very thought that I have to rebuild this VM strike horror in my heart, but luckily the good news is that I did not need to do that to resolve this issue.
It turns out that this usually happens after you had not power up the VM for a while and over a few version of VMWare upgrade. Somehow the lock file just get corrupted. Go into your VM Machine's directory and you will see some directories with *lck* and maybe 1 or 2 tiny files inside. Well those are are source of the issues.
Simply delete all those directories with the tiny files with the lck extension or keyword in them. That fixed my problem and the VM is back booting up happily. If you want to be safe, you can always make a copy of the VM or a copy of those directories before you go ahead with the deletion.
It is a simple problem, but VMWare seems to make it into such a big issue that your VM no longer starts. But luckily the fix is just as simple.
