I’ve spent a couple of weeks trying to recover some data from an old vmware machine. I didn’t want to install vmware on my new OS, so I looked into the vmware-mount program. The documentation refers to vmware-mount.pl, but I couldn’t find that file at first. It looks like since VMWare 2.0, vmware-mount.pl and vmware-loop have been replaced by a single vmware-mount binary, which behaves slightly differently.

I initially had problems with vmware-mount from VMware-server-2.0.0-122956.i386.tar.gz. I was getting this error:

vmware-mount: error while loading shared libraries: libfuse.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I saw other reports of the same error, but no solution. I was using vmware-mount from a 32bit build on a 64bit OS, so instead I tried the vmware-mount from VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.x86_64.tar.gz. Then I got an error along the lines of:

SSLLoadSharedLibrary: Failed to load library libcrypto.so.0.9.8:/usr/local/bin/libdir/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8/libcrypto.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Core dump limit is 0 KB.
Child process 26541 failed to dump core (status 0x6).

VMware Server Error:
VMware Server unrecoverable error: (app)
SSLLoadSharedLibrary: Failed to load library libcrypto.so.0.9.8:/usr/local/bin/libdir/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8/libcrypto.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
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I read this. With a little guesswork this command seemed to do the trick:

sudo ln -s /lib /usr/lib/vmware

Now vmware-mount would list my partitions. First major breakthrough.

Mounting suspended disks

It complained that my virtual machine was in a suspended state, and so it wasn’t safe to mount the disk. I found I could bypass this problem by moving all the vmdk files into a separate directory. Then running vmware-mount in that directory. It effectively ignored all the vmware machine files, and used only the hard disk files.

mkdir vmdks
sudo mv *.vmdk vmdks/
cd vmdks


Now I could mount my /boot partition within the VM, but not the second partition because it was was an LVM container. A whole new problem to solve.

Mounting LVM volumes with vmware-mount

I stumbled on my buddy John’s post. That and this helped me figure out what was required.

My first step was to mount the disk flat, using a command like:

sudo vmware-mount -f pathToVMDK.vmdk /path/to/mount

That worked, sort of. With fdisk -l /path/to/mount I could see the two partitions. But sudo vgscan couldn’t find the lvm partition. I tried sudo losetup /dev/loop0 /path/to/mount/flat, but that didn’t work either.

I figured I needed vmware-loop to mount the partition as a loop device. I searched the VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.x86_64.tar.gz file for vmware-loop, but it was nowhere to be found. That’s when I started investigating with previous versions of VMWare. It looks like the 1.0.* releases included vmware-mount.pl and vmware-loop while the 2.0.* releases only include the new vmware-mount binary.

I downloaded VMware-server-1.0.9-156507.tar.gz. In that tar file I extracted bin/vmware-mount.pl and bin/vmware-loop. These were the files I needed. I skipped vmware-mount and went straight to vmware-loop. I was able to mount the second partition directly onto a network block device (/dev/dbd0) with:

sudo vmware-loop pathToVMDK.vmdk 2 /dev/nbd0

Now I could use the lvm commands to activate and mount my lvm. Note that vmware-loop is running the whole time, so I left it in a separate terminal. I closed it with CTRL-C at the very end of the process.

sudo vgscan
sudo vgchange -ay VolGroup00
sudo mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/

Finally, I was able to copy the files from my virtual hard drive. I made a full backup with tar and then grabbed some other specific files and unmounted the whole thing.

sudo umount /mnt/
sudo vgchange -an VolGroup00

If you’re struggling with vmware-mount and  LVM or suspended disks, I hope this helps. Comments welcome.