After installing VMWare tools on a Linux VMWare guest operating system you might get the “VFS: busy inodes on changed media” error message repeating on the console. This post looks at the simple solution to get rid of the repeating message.

The error message looks like this:

VFS: busy inodes on changed media

and keeps repeating on the console over and over again. I’m not sure what causes it but it happens directly after installing VMWare Tools but the solution is simple: all you need to do is unmount the virtual CD that was mounted when VMWare Tools was installed.

Assuming the CD was mounted at /mnt/cdrom or the CD device is at /dev/cdrom, you can unmount it using the following command from a terminal:

umount /mnt/cdrom
OR
umount /dev/cdrom

Once you have unmounted the virtual CD the repeating message will stop.