Changing VM to EFI mode

[monkeybagel]

Hi everyone,

Does anyone know what will invalidate the firmware = "efi" string in the config file?  Apparently there are some hardware on a default Windows generated .vmx file that will not allow this simple string to be added to change to EFI.  It continues to boot using BIOS mode (the OS is not installed yet).  I removed the SCSI devices and added a SATA hard disk, and that did not work.  Anyone have any ideas?  This is Fusion 7 Professional.

Thank you

Jeff

[dariusd]

Hi Jeff,

There is no virtual hardware that will invalidate the firmware = "efi" configuration... your assumption is incorrect.  EFI firmware is independent of the virtual hardware and will work with almost any VM that has at least 96 MBytes of RAM.

Make sure you power off the VM completely (not just suspend it) before editing the configuration to set firmware = "efi", otherwise Fusion might overwrite your configuration changes.  If all else fails, quit Fusion entirely and then edit the configuration file.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[monkeybagel]

Any other idea's what it could be (I have done both of your suggestions already). Does the position of the firmware = "efi" need to be above/below another device in the VMX file? 

[dariusd · Accepted solution]

No... the position within the file is irrelevant.

Check that your text editor isn't adding "smart quotes" around the value.  See this document for how to control this in most OS X text editors, including TextEdit: OS X Mavericks: Substitute text in documents

Cheers,

--

Darius

[monkeybagel]

I believe this was the issue.  Once "Smart Quotes" were disabled in TextEdit, the problem was fixed.  Thank you for your help!