One of the teams here uses build scripts with hardcoded paths; and while I was on that team I needed to fit in (when you are in Rome be a Roman). In a nutshell I needed a second (D) hard-disk.

That’s long gone now; so today I did some file pruning and deleted the VMDKs I used for that drive; VMWare refused to boot my machine because there was a snapshot with that file somewhere in the hierarchy.

As it turns out the snapshot was a sibling of my current one – which seems odd; logic dictates that the VMDK should only be needed for the descendants of that snapshot. In any case I had to kill nearly every snapshot to be able to boot the VM (Murphy made sure that it was the last snapshot I deleted); on top of that I needed to remove the drive and RAM file locks.

This is the first time I have had a gripe with VMWare. It wasn’t really a train smash but inconvenient at best. My snapshot nesting was getting ridiculous, so I shouldn’t really complain.