VMware Cloud Community
natewilson
Contributor
Contributor

Mac OS X 8 (Mountain Lion) guest on Mac Mini ESXi - stuck at gray boot screen.

I have a new Mac Mini system (Quad Core i7, 16GB Memory) runnning ESXi 5, on which I am running a few Linux VMs.   I am now trying to install Mac OS X v8 in another VM, and have run into problems.

I followed the standard installation process in the VMware KB.  The initial installation goes fine.  It reboots once, then finishes the installation.  After that, it reboots again into what should be the initial system setup.  But, it hangs forever at the gray boot screen with the white Apple logo.  The spinner just keeps going and going..  I left it running last night, and in the morning it was still in the same state.

I deleted the first VM and did a clean re-install, but got the same result.

Is there anything else needed to get Mac OS X to boot?

Tags (4)
Reply
0 Kudos
3 Replies
dariusd
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi natewilson,

What's the model ID of the host, as shown on the ESXi screen?  I expect it's a Macmini5,2, Macmini5,3 or Macmini6,2.  If it's a Macmini6,2, see my posts in this thread:

If that doesn't help, could you please attach the vmware.log from a VM which has faield to boot into Mac OS?  (Just use the Browse... button below when composing a reply.)

Cheers,

--

Darius

Reply
0 Kudos
natewilson
Contributor
Contributor

It's the newest Mini, "Macmini6,2".

That thread is huge, so maybe I missed something, but I didn't see any mentions of something resembling my problem.   Is there a specific post you are referring to?    In general, the Mini is working fine and I am running several Linux and one Windows VM on it.

Attached is the vmware.log file.  Note that there are some messages about the CD drive because the install DMG was attached.  I have since removed that and rebooted, but the behavior is still the same.

Reply
0 Kudos
dariusd
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

You are having the same SMC problem as the other users in that thread.  Your vmware.log contains

2012-12-02T06:41:43.325Z| vcpu-0| I120: HostSMCRead: Unable to open the driver.
2012-12-02T06:41:43.340Z| vcpu-0| I120: HostSMCRead: Unable to open the driver.

... which means that, as far as ESXi is concerned, it thinks it's not really a Mac.  This is due to a change that Apple made to their latest hardware, which ESXi is not yet able to handle.

Look for zer010gic's post in that other thread, where there's a link to an ESXi 5.1 ISO image specifically with SMC in its name.  That is the same release of ESXi as you are running there, but preconfigured with the network drivers for the Macmini, with the iovDisableIR=TRUE config option that stops the PSOD at boot, and also includes an engineering fix for the SMC problem you're hitting (not an official fix, just a quick workaround we put together to get your Mac OS guests booting again).

Some users have reported that they can't "upgrade" their existing installed ESXi to the patched one, so you might need to do a fresh installation before things start to work.

Hope this helps!

--

Darius

Reply
0 Kudos