How do I fix a corrupt VMware Fusion Vista virtual machine?

After seeing your question, I was hoping I'd never see similar errors myself, but the bad news is that I've seen similar problems from both VMWare Fusion and Parallels. In both virtual machine apps on the Mac sometimes, well, things happen.

With some irony, I find myself in the same darn situation with my Macbook Air. What makes the Air a bit more problematic is that it doesn't have a CDROM/DVD drive built into the unit, but rather has an external drive that hooks up via the USB port. It might not make a difference, but somehow I never quite got things working.

Let me show you the situation I encountered and what I tried to get it to work...

First off, the error screen:

Logically, I should be able to install the Microsoft Windows Vista install DVD, reboot, and have everything repair itself, right?

My first try is to simply plug in the CDROM/DVD drive and restart. The latter, by the way, you accomplish in VMWare Fusion by choosing "Restart Guest":

That didn't accomplish anything, however, so I checked the settings and found that I hadn't connected the CD/DVD drive. That was easily remedied with Virtual Machine --> CD/DVD --> Connect CD/DVD:

But.... that didn't work either.

One last try. I used "CD/DVD Settings..." on the same menu and tweaked the settings to automatically connect the drive:

No joy. There's no way I can see to actually have the Vista virtual machine see the CD/DVD drive at boot time, so I'm afraid my recommendation is to just delete the virtual machine and reinstall from scratch.

That, by the way, is done by simply going into your "Documents" folder and looking for a folder called "Virtual Machines.localized". That's where VMWare stores its virtual machines. Delete the matching operating system. My Vista install is "Windows Vista.vmwarevm".

Hopefully someone from the VMware team will add a comment explaining another way we could have side-stepped this problem and repaired our Vista installation.