VMware Workstation – “Cannot open one of the virtual disks needed by this VM because it is larger that the maximum size supported by the host file system”

After moving a VMware Workstation VM from one PC to another you may receive the following error message when going to start it:

“VMware Workstation cannot open one of the virtual disks needed by this VM because it is larger that the maximum size supported by the host file system.”

The most common cause is that, as the error message outlines, the underlying file system on which the VM is being run from doesn’t support larger files than 2GB.  Your VMs VMDK disk will, in the majority of cases be bigger than this.  For example a hard disk formatted with FAT32 will throw up this error.

Though not to worry all is not lost as you can tell VMware Workstation to skip checking any underlying disk file size limitations (ie: 2GB) by adding the following line to your VMs VMX file.  Note: The VMX file is generally found in the same directory as your VMs VMDK file.

 diskLib.sparseMaxFileSizeCheck= "FALSE"

If you are going to be moving VMs between PCs that have this 2GB file limitation then you should consider configuring any future virtual disks to use a set of files limited to 2GB per file. This setting is defined at the time of creating the virtual disk with VMware Workstation.