I went to defragment one of my virtual machines that was performing poorly. When I went to defrag, I received the error "The specific virtual disk needs repair"

Reason: the specific virtual disk needs repair.

The above happened to me on VMWare Workstation 15.

A way around this is as follows:

  • Open command prompt
  • In the command prompt go to the location of where vmware is installed, in my case: “C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation”
  • Make a note of the vmdk file you need to deal with (the error will show you the path and filename of the file you need to deal with.
  • On the command prompt run: vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -R “path of the vmdk file”
  • Hit enter
  • You should get a reply that says: “The virtual disk ‘path of file’ , was corrupted and has been successfully repaired.”
  • Below is what it looks like on my end:

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation>vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -R "D:\VMWare\Ubuntu\Ubuntu-000001.vmdk"
The virtual disk, 'D:\VMWare\Ubuntu\Ubuntu-000001.vmdk', was corrupted and has been successfully repaired.