VMWare Fusion: Check for missing files failed: Insufficient permissions to access the file – an additional tip

I ran into this error a couple of days ago on my Mac OS X Leopard system – my machine had shut down uncleanly for an unrelated reason. When I rebooted, and tried to restart a suspended VM, that error came up and the VM wouldn't start.

What to do?

The tips at this article at the VMWare Forum provided some hints:

VM not starting after crash, Check for missing files failed: Insufficient permissions...

... but looking around, I didn't see any actual files with incorrect permissions.

It turned out that my VM files were located on an external disk that had gotten mounted read-only.

I easily fixed it by running Disk Utility, selecting the volume that contained my VMs, and selecting "Verify Disk", which unmounted the disk, verified it, and then remounted it read-write.

Then starting up the VM worked fine.