KB177477

Introduction

This article gives an important warning about normal user procedures of manipulation of VMware virtual machine configuration files. The Windows notepad program may be used to modify these files with which character encoding may be ignored by the user, then, after saving the file previous data might lost.

Symptoms

A user opens a VMware virtual machine configuration file (.vmx) using Windows' Notepad program, and made appropriate changes to the configuration file. After confirming the modified portion, he/she saves the file directly, which may cause data loss because of character encoding issues.

Cause

The root cause of this issue is because of the Notepad program fails to handle certain character encoding. The exact character encoding supported by Notepad is up decided by the non-Unicode character setting of Windows for which the program relies on. For example, on a Windows installation that has this setting set to Unicode, GB2312-encoded files will be unable to open correctly, and subsequent saves will render those encoded data lost.

Moreover, certain VMware products, including VMware Workstation, determines the right character encoding that can be used to save data in the configuration file. If only Chinese characters included in GB2312 are entered in the Notes section of a virtual machine, the entire configuration file may be saved using such encoding method. Manipulating such a file with Notepad running on an English copy of Windows might then encounter this issue.

Solution

Use another plain-text editing program, for example, Notepad++, to modify those kinds of files. Or, modify the files only when confirmed that Notepad supports the correct character encoding of these files.