Thursday, May 15, 2014

The wizard was interrupted before VMware Tools could be completely installed.

Upon attempting to install VMware Tools on a Windows Server 2008R2 server, I received an error stating "The wizard was interrupted before VMware Tools could be completely installed."

After looking around on the internet, the closest thing I could find was this post by David Homer, detailing a similar issue with VMware Tools on VMware Workstation.

I tried his fixes (remove VMware Tools registry key, remove the vmtools service), but none of them allowed me to get past the problem.

What eventually worked was doing a search in the registry for all references to "vmware" and removing all keys having to do with VMware Tools - make sure you don't remove any of the keys referring to your SCSI devices/other hardware; just the VMware Tools entries.

I believe it was most likely the Installer registry entries that were mucking it up.

After a quick reboot to refresh the registry, VMware Tools installed with no issues.

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Dustin Shaw
VCP