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hajk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

EFI Boot delay in Fusion 11

I upgraded my existing VM in the newly-installed Fusion 11, but now the boot screen hangs

for about 1 minute with messages:

Attempting to start up from:

-> EFI VMware Virtual SCSI Hard Drive (0.0)... unsuccessful.

-> EFI VMware Virtual SCSI Hard Drive (0.0)... unsuccessful.

-> EFI Network...

after finally booting. Why this delay?

FWIW, the delay goes away when I revert virtualHW.version = "16" to "14" in the .vmx file, but

I presume that the upgrade to "16" is there for a reason. Is it possible to make that delay go away

while keeping virtualHW.version = "16"?

4 Replies
hajk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

After further investigation it appears that Fusion 11 (VirtualHW.version = "16") does not

honour the EFI Boot order, whereas Fusion 10 (VirtualHW.version = "14") does.

The EFI Boot options include

EFI VMware Virtual SCSI Hard Drive (0.0)

EFI Network

EFI Internal Shell (Unsupported option)

which appear to be hardcoded in the VM, because they reappear at the next boot when I

delete them with the 'efibootmgr' utility.

The boot option for my OS, Debian GNU/Linux, was added and made first in  the boot order.

This works fine in VirtualHW.version = "14", but not in "16" where options further in the boot

order are tried first. This even happens when my OS is specifically made to be the next boot

choice.

It is unfortunate that Fusion 11 does not implement EFI booting properly.

hajk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

OK, and now the work-around for booting Debian GNU/Linux (which shouldn't be necessary if

Fusion 11 honoured the EFI Boot order in NVRAM).

That Debian boot option in NVRAM refers to file EFI/debian/grubx64.efi located on the EFI System

Partition, most likely /dev/sda1. It is this file that is eventually found and booted after the delay.

It will be found immediately when copied and renamed as follows (with root privileges):

0. The EFI System Partition is mounted in Debian on /boot/efi.

1. Make a new directory /boot/efi/EFI/boot on the EFI System Partition.

2. Copy/rename /boot/efi/EFI/debian/grubx64.efi to /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi.

Reboot and there is no longer any delay. You then might as well remove the Debian boot option

from NVRAM.

hajk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

My work-around does not merit a "Correct Answer" star, because it will not work when

you have more than one VM. In that case the route via NVRAM is needed, which needs

fixing in Fusion 11.

blaxxx
Contributor
Contributor

Hey mate, thanks for sharing your solution, it's a shame no one here said a thing.

cheers to you!

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