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How-to: fix Windows 7 networking problems with VMware Fusion on MacBook Air

September 12th, 2009

I recently installed WIndows 7 on a MacBook Air under VMware Fusion 2.0. The install went cleanly, but I could not get any network connectivity.

Eventually I found this thread on the VMware community site that fixed the problem.  Seems that there is an entry missing from the VMX file.

To fix the problem, make sure the virtual machine is powered off, navigate to the Virtual Machines folder in Documents (or wherever you store your VMware files), right-click on the virtual machine and choose ‘Show Package Contents’.  Scroll down to find the file with the .vmx extension and edit it with text editor.  Your file should contain a lot of lines including:

ethernet0.present = “TRUE”
ethernet0.connectionType = “nat”
ethernet0.wakeOnPcktRcv = “FALSE”
ethernet0.linkStatePropagation.enable = “TRUE”

Add the following line:
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”

Start up the virtual machine.  Windows should install a new driver and you should be good to go.

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  1. jojo
    January 18th, 2010 at 20:52 | #1

    Had exactly same problem with Mac Mini, Snow Leopard, VMFusion 3 and Windows 7. Worked perfectly, great post many thx

  2. December 8th, 2011 at 04:37 | #2

    You can also use  The Network & Internet Diagnostic & Repair Tool  in Windows 7 will help you identify the potential issues preventing network connectivity, and it automatically takes appropriate steps toward correcting them..  If a computer on the network loses Internet connectivity, you can graphically see which connection is down and then use Network Diagnostics to help determine the cause of the problem and find possible solutions..

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