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After booting the guest system, the shared folders are in sync and all works well. As soon as I make a change to one of the files on my host system (Windows 7), the file on the guest system (Ubuntu) loses its last characters and still has the old version. The actual change is not synced. However, the version on the guest gets truncated. If I delete the file on the host and create a new one with new content, everything is in sync again.
It all started happening when I updated VMWare player 6.0.1. And its happening for my Ubuntu guests only (Redhat works fine).
How can I tell VMware tools to force a sync on the shared folders?
Host: Windows 7
Guest: Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS
VMWare: 6.0.1 build-1379776
VMWare-Tools: VMwareTools-9.6.1-1378637.tar.gz
JochenJung
Posted 2013-10-30T07:45:35.200
Reputation: 121
Thank you for a good description of the problem. Maybe it would help if you describe in more details how is the file truncated. Is it truncated to a multiple of some block length or something else. Does the file length in the directory listing correspond to the truncated length? Does the truncation depend on which part of the file was edited? – pabouk – 2013-10-30T08:16:42.377
The truncation does seam to have something to do with line breaks. They seam to be converted from windows to unix format. The number of characters truncated from the file, seam to depend on the number of line breaks the file has. Though I'm not sure, yet. – JochenJung – 2013-10-30T10:19:39.587
In this case I would check if an text editor on Windows did not silently convert the endlines or did you explicitly convert the endlines? – pabouk – 2013-10-30T12:12:34.327
On windows its Sublime Text 2. On Ubuntu its cat / vi. But its not just the line ending. Its also content being deleted at the end, which I had never before with those editors. And those characters at the end of the file are only missing on the guest, when I edit it on the host. So I assume, the editor does everything correct. – JochenJung – 2013-10-30T12:43:15.763
1Description from VMWare forums: Some fixes went in to deal with concurrent file accesses for read/write all within the guest OS.
However, this appears to intermittently break when the file has changed on the host in-between uses within the guest OS.
The guest OS side is failing to note the file change and purge the guest OS cache and reload the file as new. Recommended solution is to downgrade as per Bryan Kohlmeier's answer – Ian Gregory – 2014-01-12T16:43:18.013
1I have exactly the same problem after updating to 6.0.1, I found that occasionally files modified on the Windows Host do not show their modifications on the Ubuntu VM. The files are being versioned somehow to the previous version. Restarting the VM brings the files back into alignment, but after a while they drift again after editing on the Windows Host. – None – 2013-11-07T02:34:13.637