The Selected Virtual Disk Is Incompatible with This Workstation

Error: The selected virtual disk is incompatible with this Workstation

The virtualization technology is a huge improve to the utilization of computing resources. It allows multiple different operating systems to be installed and run on one single physical hardware, for example, install macOS on a Windows machine.

This operation is achieved through a hypervisor, like VMware Workstation which is a popular type-2 hypervisor of VMware. However, many errors may occur during this process as well. “The selected virtual disk is incompatible with this Workstation” is one of them.

The reason why the selected virtual disk is incompatible

The error “the selected virtual disk is incompatible with this Workstation” is one of the common errors that may occur when installing macOS on Windows. It means you have installed a virtual machine and upgraded your VMware Workstation, but have not updated the hardware compatibility of this virtual machine.

All virtual machines have a hardware version, the hardware indicates which virtual hardware features that the virtual machine supports, such as BIOS, EFI system partition, the actual number of virtual slots, firmware and more.

When you upgrade your VMware Workstation, no matter it is Workstation Pro or Workstation Player, you need to change the hardware compatibility of the virtual machine in time, so that they can use the new features in the new version of Workstation. If you don't do this, it may pop up this error.

2 ways to change VMware Workstation VM hardware compatibility

If you encounter hardware compatibility errors, in most cases they can be resolved by upgrading your VMware Workstation to the latest version. But if you don’t want to upgrade it for some reason, there is also other options you can choose.

In this part, I will show you 2 ways to change the VMware Workstation VM hardware compatibility and fix the error “the selected virtual disk is incompatible with this Workstation”. Before you start, please make a virtual machine backup to protect the virtual disk (.vmdk) files from unexpected data loss.

In addition, before you upgrade or downgrade a Workstation virtual machine, make a note of the NIC settings in the guest operating system. This is because if you specified a static IP address for the virtual machine, that setting might be changed to automatic assignment by DHCP after the upgrade.

Change VMware Workstation VM hardware compatibility via official wizard

VMware Workstation provide an official Change Hardware Compatibility Wizard for you to safely upgrade or change a virtual machine from one generation to another, allowing the virtual machine to work with a different generation of products, for example, move Workstation VM to ESXi.

1. Shut down the guest operating system and power off the virtual machine.

2. Select the target virtual machine and click VM > Manage > Change Hardware Compatibility… to open the wizard.

3. Select the Hardware compatibility version you need, and click Next to continue.

Note: Using Workstation 10 or later, you can change the hardware compatibility of a shared or remote virtual machine. However, you cannot downgrade a previously created virtual machine.

4. Select to Create a new clone of this virtual machine, or Alter this virtual machine. Click Next to continue.

5. If you choose to create a clone, you will need to provide a Name and Location for this new virtual machine. And then click Finish to change the hardware compatibility.

6. Power on the target virtual machine. Check and change the NIC settings in the guest OS back to their original settings if they have changed. In addition, if the virtual machine does not have the latest version of VMware Tools installed, then update VMware Tools.

Change the VMware Workstation VM hardware compatibility by editing VMX file

Except for using the official wizard to change the hardware compatibility version, there is also an easier way to quickly complete the conversion of hardware compatibility version. However, if this is your production machine, please choose this method carefully or backup the entire VM before you start.

1. Power off the target virtual machine.

2. Navigate to the VM folder where the virtual disk and configuration file of the target virtual machine are stored.

Tip: You can find the folder path in Virtual Machine Details or by moving your cursor to the name of the target VM.

3. Right-click on the VMX file and select Open with > Notepad.

4. Find the column “virtualHW.version = X” and change the number to whatever the hardware compatibility version you want.

5. Save the change and close the Notepad. Power on the virtual machine, check the settings and change them back to their original state.

Summary

If you encountered the error “the selected virtual disk is incompatible with this Workstation”, it may because when you installing macOS on Windows, you have bot updated the hardware compatibility of this virtual machine.

In this article I showed 2 ways to fix the VMware hardware version compatibility problem. It is recommended to use the official Change Hardware Compatibility Wizard as a safer solution. If it does not solve your problem, then please remember to backup VMware Workstation VM before using the second solution to avoid data loss.