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tjrob
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Catalina infinite restart loop after upgrading fusion to 12.1.2

I just upgraded VMware Fusion to 12.1.2. Now my Catalina VM is in an infinite restart loop (see attached screenshot). This did not happen before the upgrade.

Fusion is running on a Mac Pro (late 2013) with 8 cores and 16 GB memory. The VM is allocated 4 cores and 4 GB memory.

Note that Catalina does this on the Mac Pro itself, whenever it is put into power sleep (which I have since disabled). But it only needs a single restart, not an infinite loop.

How can I fix this?

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tjrob
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

2 notes:

  1. The host OS is also Catalina.
  2. A High Sierra (10.13.6) VM works just fine, as does a Windows 10 VM.

 

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tjrob
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I attempted to upgrade a copy of my High Sierra VM to Catalina. The upgrade has hung for over 2 hours and I'm killing it.

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wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,


@tjrob wrote:

I just upgraded VMware Fusion to 12.1.2.

Upgraded from what? Fusion 12.1.1 ?
Don't make us having to guess please.

re. the restart loop. That's a full on crash.
Normally you see those when there's a hardware issue.

As you say "this didn't happen before"... have you tried rolling back?
Sometimes an upgrade is just exposing a problem underneath. If the crash goes away after downgrading to whatever VMware Fusion version you were running earlier then at least you are ruling out that it isn't a hardware error that happens to coincide with an upgrade (it happens, regularly even)

Once you have ruled that out, then try to see what happens if you go from 4 cores vCPU's to 2 cores vCPU.
Does it still crash?

Did your VM perhaps get a macOS update recently?

Lot's of questions when reading your post...

Also, the screenshot helps, but it is probably better to attach a vmware.log file from the problem VM.

--
Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

I had this happen on two of my physical machines after the Catalina upgrade.  On one, booting into safe mode fixed it.  On the other, I had to make a USB installer and reinstall catalina over the existing install.

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