I was troubleshooting a View Agent install and decided to uninstall VMware Tools. I don’t know how it happened, but I rebooted right after I uninstalled.
The console of the VM looked like this when it came back up
It’s like it took the black splash screen with the glowing windows icon and multiplied it.
Google didn’t tell me much besides playing with the cpu counts, network, cdrom and the video memory (none of which helped).
My guess was that a VGA driver was all messed up, so I knew that I had to re-install VMware tools, but how?
Good ‘ol Safe Mode
First thing you want to do is to put a pause in POST so that you can press F8 to go into safe mode (see this kb)
Login through the console with an id that you used previously that is ALSO admin.
Next thing I found is that Safe Mode does not support the installation services, but I found this blog from Symantec to add reg keys and start the service
Now the VMware Tools installer will run, and did allow me to RDP into the box, but the odd video issues in the console were still present.
I was able to ultimately resolve the issue by uninstalling the View Agent Direct-Connection plugin and the View Agent and then re-installing both (View Agent and then View Agent Direct-Connection plugin).
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