fix being unable to copy files using vmware shared folder from freebsd guest to host

1 min readOct 6, 2020

To install vmware tools under freebsd , you can follow this post .

If you face a problem , while trying to copy files from freebsd 12.1 , to shared folders using vmware , like the following one :

Error while copying to "tmp"
There is not enough space on the destination. Try to remove files to make space .

You can select either copy anyway , or cancel , if you select copy anyway , and get :

Error writing to file . 
Input/output error.
Do you want to skip it .

Then there are two solutions for this problem , the first one consists of adding max_write=32768 into /etc/fstab , so it will look like this :

.host:/ /mnt/hgfs fusefs rw,mountprog=/usr/local/bin/vmhgfs-fuse,allow_other,max_write=32768,failok 0 0

The second solution consists , of installing an older version of open-vm-tools . This can be done by creating the file /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/freebsd-12-0.conf with the following content :

FreeBSD: { priority: 100 }
 
freebsd-12-0: {
  url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/release_0",
  mirror_type: "srv",
  signature_type: "fingerprints",
  fingerprints: "/usr/share/keys/pkg",
  enabled: yes
  priority: 50
}

And installing the older version of open-vm-tools by issuing the command :

root$ pkg delete open-vm-tools 
# Delete any version of open-vm-tools which is installed .root$ pkg install --repository=freebsd-12-0 open-vm-tools
# Install open vm tools from the
# repository which contains the older
# package .

Originally published at https://twiserandom.com on October 6, 2020.

fix being unable to copy files using vmware shared folder from freebsd guest to host

Written by mohamad wael