I am getting more and more familiar with VMware Player since I use it almost every day in my current project. When I restarted my computer and the image after an unexpected shutdown I got this message: This virtual machine appears to be in use. This post lets you know how to easily get your image up and running again.

Above you can see the alert box I got when I tried to start my image in the VMware Player. The configuration file only tells you the path to your image, I added a censor strip since the path revealed my customer name.

1. Go to the configuration file path (where you have you image)
2. There you will find some folders with .lck ending (this is the locking file state)
3. In my case three folders (imagename.vmem.lck, imagename.vmdk.lck and imagename.vmx.lck)
4. Delete those folders
5. Restart your image

This did the trick for me

Take notice that you might loose unsaved work on your image by doing this.