I'm having this trouble (this is the second time now) where I cannot power on a virtual machine. The message "Unable to access file since it is locked. Since the filename is unspecified, it makes it hard to figure out what the issue is.
I have 3 ESX4 hosts in a cluster. I moved everything off of host 2 to host 1 (except the affected machine), and then reboot host 2. Upon power up the VM still will not start. It gets to 95% and then that specified error message displays.
What I originally tried to do is resize the disk of the particular machine. I wasn't able to since it was thick provisioned, so I used the vmware converter and moved it to host 3 with a new name. Well when the converter finished I could not start either of the VM's (the original, or the one with the slightly smaller disk). So I thought the new converted machine was causing the issues, so I deleted it. Well now I can't even power on the original.
This isn't the first time this happened. After a using vmware converter to get a P2V done a few days ago, I couldn't start up the new imported virtual machine. I forget what we rebooted and in what order it was done. Don't rememver if it was the vcenter server that we rebooted, or if it was the affected host.
Thanks for the suggestions. It seems as if this "locked" file is the Achilles heel of our VMWare implementation. If only there was a way to handle files so they wouldn't arbitrarily lock. Although that's a discussion in another computing topic.
Thanks!