Cannot capture a VMware virtual machine with VMware tools installed.

[Jmorales]

I having trouble capturing an image. I keep getting this error. "Cannot capture a VMware virtual machine with VMware tools installed."

I already uninstalled the tools and checked all registry settings to verify removal and still get the same error.

Any suggestions? I thought this tools was supposed to work smoothly but is not. We purchased a license and have wasted days with no luck.

Thanks,

[Allen Marsh]

We recommend not installing the VMware Tools in your reference machine, because the uninstall process does not clean up everything. Drivers and services are left behind even after uninstall, and you'll then be deploying those things to all your endpoints.

To verify if the VMware Tools are installed, we check the following registry locations.

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{FE2F6A2C-196E-4210-9C04-2B1BC21F07EF}
HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\VMTools
HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\VMwareTools

So, check your VM and if any of those exist, delete them. Capture Wizard will then work.

Please feel free to email us directly at support@smartdeploy.com if you have any further issues.

Thanks!

[Jmorales]

Already done all those steps and nothing. Starting to build image from scratch, not happy with this product.

[Allen Marsh]

If you have any snapshots on the VM, then you might not be capturing the content you are seeing when the VM is running.

If there are snapshots, then you can try to capture that VM by booting the VM to the SmartDeploy.iso and capturing it that way.

This will capture the content of snapshots, where as capturing with it powered off will not.

[Daniel]

On 6/24/2015 at 12:55 PM, Allen Marsh said:

We recommend not installing the VMware Tools in your reference machine, because the uninstall process does not clean up everything. Drivers and services are left behind even after uninstall, and you'll then be deploying those things to all your endpoints.

To verify if the VMware Tools are installed, we check the following registry locations.

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{FE2F6A2C-196E-4210-9C04-2B1BC21F07EF}
HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\VMTools
HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\VMwareTools

So, check your VM and if any of those exist, delete them. Capture Wizard will then work.

Please feel free to email us directly at support@smartdeploy.com if you have any further issues.

Thanks!

There seems to be more being checked.  I have not taken a snapshot of my VM, installed Tools to get network to run updates, uninstalled, and these keys are not on the machine, but I still get the same error.  I need to be able to use VMWare for our base image and current versions require Tools to be installed for network access; there has to be a work-around for this.