Failure to install VMware Tools: Cannot find the answer BINDIR in the installer database Details If a VMware Tools installation is stopped before it can set the BINDIR (which occurs after the first prompted question), the installer is stopped prematurely and displays the following message: A previous installation of VMware Tools has been detected. The previous installation was made by the tar installer (version 4). Keeping the tar4 installer database format. You have a version of VMware Tools installed. Continuing this install will first uninstall the currently installed version. Do you wish to continue? (yes/no) [yes] If you select yes, the following error message appears: Error: Unable to find the binary installation directory (answer BINDIR) in the installer database file "/etc/vmware-tools/locations". Uninstall failed. Please correct the failure and re run the install. Execution aborted.
Solution:
To solve this issue, remove the /etc/vmware-tools/locations file and reinstall VMware Tools.