A little while back I upgraded our production cluster to a new ESXi version. The upgrade was smooth (as usual, knock on wood) and a new version of VMware Tools was to be deployed. No problem, done’ it many times. This time, there were about 10% of our workstations that were unable to update. I had set them to automatic update on reboot and had all our workstations rebooted overnight.
So, I thought, well, let’s try to manual update them. Mounted the installer and it went all the way up to starting services, where it would eventually fail, specifically trying to start VMware Alias Manager and Ticket Service (VGAuthService) I did a reboot of the machine and tried to uninstall VMware Tools, which at first failed. After issuing a setup /c on the mounted installer, it did uninstall. Great, let’s do another reboot and install the new version…
…but that failed exactly at the same point in the installation process again. So, I spent some time researching and tried some things I found on blogs (reinstalling MS C++ Redistributable, tried different versions), all to no avail.
At the end the solution was surprisingly simple: Make sure none of the VMware Tools service are running.
- Uninstall VMware Tools (use setup /c if needed).
- Then, delete the files (this is what I missed to do before) here C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools and here C:\program data\VMware\VMware tools\
- Reboot
- Install the new version
At the end a simple fix, but when I was stuck at this, I didn’t see those steps listed anywhere. Hopefully this can save someone some time.
‘til next time!
Thank you – After checking a number of solutions, I cam across this. It was the easiest process to follow and solved my problem. It should be noted that the second file location is a hidden rectory C:\ProgramData (in Windows 10 under VMware Fusion 11.5.1)
Glad to hear it worked for you Steve. Good point about Windows 10 and ProgramData!
Thanks bro it worked for me!
Glad to hear!
Your write up is the best I have seen yet. It didn’t work for me sadly. I was able to delete the directories referenced above inside the Windows 7 VM I am running. I have never seen d:> setup64 /c ever delete the current install of VMTools. I have conducted your instructions from my Windows 7 Administrator account. I have never seen my display go back to VGA mode during all these efforts. I have never seen VMware Inc offer any help on this problem for many years. Thanks again!
Glad to hear you found it useful!