In my current setup of my personal lab I have some VM's on an USB 3.0 disc and on my SSL. Sometimes I'm in a hurry and cannot shutdown or suspend the VM in a correct way. Most of the times I close the lit of my laptop to hibernate and think. OOPS.
If you’re really unlucky VMware will tell you it's unable to start your VM even if you reboot. take ownership will fail and you're sad.
The way to solve this issue is to go to the data store location of where your VM's are saved. You search for *.lck or *.lock files and folders. You can remove them all. After they are gone or renamed you can start the VM as normal.
Actually like for everything it's always better to prevent it from happening. But, I guess we're human..........