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Booga
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Choose Recovery Partition on Lion Guest

Hi,

I'm trying to boot on Startup Manager mode with the Mac OS X Lion guest on VMWare Fusion 4.1.3, the usual way on physical Mac computers is pressing alt (option) button, but it is not working on VMWare Fusion. How can this be achieved?

Thanks!

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dariusd
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Hi Booga,

The easiest way to boot the Recovery partition is to quickly click inside the VM window immediately after powering-on, and then hold Command+R.  You need to have Command+R held down by the time the Apple logo appears on the screen, so you do have to be reasonably fast!  That same key combination can be used to directly launch the Recovery partition on a physical Mac as well.

It's also possible to hold the Option key at boot to enter our firmware setup, although it is nowhere near as pretty as Apple's boot picker, and we have an open bug here that the Recovery HD doesn't appear in the device list anyway!  So your best bet is to use Command+R as I described above.

If it's too fast to boot and you can't press the keys in time, you can configure your VM with a delay at boot.  Follow the instructions in this Knowledge Base article: Editing the .vmx file for your Fusion virtual machine.  Add a new option as follows:

bios.bootDelay = "3000"

That will give you 3 seconds (3000 milliseconds) to click into the VM and press Command+R.

Cheers,

--

Darius

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dariusd
VMware Employee
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Hi Booga,

The easiest way to boot the Recovery partition is to quickly click inside the VM window immediately after powering-on, and then hold Command+R.  You need to have Command+R held down by the time the Apple logo appears on the screen, so you do have to be reasonably fast!  That same key combination can be used to directly launch the Recovery partition on a physical Mac as well.

It's also possible to hold the Option key at boot to enter our firmware setup, although it is nowhere near as pretty as Apple's boot picker, and we have an open bug here that the Recovery HD doesn't appear in the device list anyway!  So your best bet is to use Command+R as I described above.

If it's too fast to boot and you can't press the keys in time, you can configure your VM with a delay at boot.  Follow the instructions in this Knowledge Base article: Editing the .vmx file for your Fusion virtual machine.  Add a new option as follows:

bios.bootDelay = "3000"

That will give you 3 seconds (3000 milliseconds) to click into the VM and press Command+R.

Cheers,

--

Darius

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Booga
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the delay did the trick! Thanks a lot, great answer!!

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