Virtualization

Could not get vmci driver version on VMware Workstation 9 on Windows 8

I recently upgraded my laptop to Windows 8 and when attempting to power on my virtual machines running on VMware Workstation 9 I received the following error message:

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“Could not get vmci driver version: The handle is invalid.  You have an incorrect version of driver “vmci.sys”. Try reinstalling VMware workstation.

This worried me a bit at first but luckily there is a workaround you can do!

If you open up the configuration file of the VM you are trying to power up in notepad and edit the following line:

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Set the vmci0.present = FALSE and you should be good to go Smile

62 Comments

  1. @Lucky: Just search for the file with .vmx extension within the virtual machine folder…and open it with notepad…in that u will find these….:-)

  2. I reinstall my VMware Workstation v9.0.2 and get the same error message. I found my vmci.sys file at C:Program FilesCommon FilesVMwareDriversvmcidevice folder and I cannot use notepad to open vmci.sys. It is a binary file, not a text file. Please tell me how to modify it. Really thanks.

  3. Unfortunately this doesn’t solve the real problem, and it will cause networking to not work in your VM. In my case the real problem was caused by an unprivileged account. My solution was to reinstall VMWare from the unprivileged account and do a “repair”. This restored the vmware network connections on the machine, which fixed everything.

  4. Thanks for the solution.
    I tried installing different versions of vmware. All vmware players reported same error. Thanks again.

  5. I don’t like to edit things i don’t know what they do but i really needed to make it works.
    So grat job, thanks.

  6. Worked for me as well after a windows update.

    What did I just do, by the way? What does this configuration change actually change in behavioural terms?

  7. Thanks! This helped – I had recently transferred hard drives from a backup and for some reason kept getting this error when trying to load my VM from Vmware Player 3.x in Win7. Your change made it work instantly, and there was no apparent problem with networking as some here have suggested. I was able to not only load the VM but access the internet, my local network and copy & paste files from host to VM. So thanks again for sharing your fix!

    (I would however still like to know what went wrong and what that change means exactly)

  8. I have the same issue after upgrading to Windows 10, but this quick fix does not seem to fix the issue!!, So is there any fixes for this when under Windows 10??

  9. I have the same issue after upgrading to Windows 10, but this quick fix does not seem to fix the issue!!, So is there any fixes for this when under Windows 10??

  10. Tip to add: if you are running the virtual from external hard drive, it will not be located in the c drive for obvious reasons. I found the configuration file in the same folder as my virtual, right click on it and opened with notepad. I then was able to change the value to false and it worked 🙂 BTW in the description portion if you get confused what is the configuration file, it will say in the description its the configuration file. Just changed it for a windows 7 64 bit virtual and worked like a charm! Thank you!!!

  11. Tip to add: if you are running the virtual from external hard drive, it will not be located in the c drive for obvious reasons. I found the configuration file in the same folder as my virtual, right click on it and opened with notepad. I then was able to change the value to false and it worked 🙂 BTW in the description portion if you get confused what is the configuration file, it will say in the description its the configuration file. Just changed it for a windows 7 64 bit virtual and worked like a charm! Thank you!!!

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