GOTCHA #3: As of Fusion 11, Cmd+R is interpreted as either Restore Snapshot, or boot to firmware depending on when hit it. Use an Apple keyboard, or the built-in on a MacBook. GOTCHA #2: If you’re using a non-Apple keyboard the guest may not recognize Cmd+R. This can be changed by editing the Mac OS profile for the guest under “Keyboard & Mouse” HOWEVER – watch out for your VM keyboard setting to ensure you have not changed the default for sending Apple global keyboard shortcuts to the guest and not the host. What I found was the community article below, which offers other suggestions to get your guest booted into recovery without messing with the nvram settings: I WAS HOPING that rather than removing the setting, changing TRUE to FALSE would cause a subsequent update of the nvram and allow the guest to boot normally. Normally the VMware engineers are pretty thorough – especially the hardware team.Īnyway, it appears that when Fusion encounters this setting on boot, it sets a flag in nvram. pointed out, this does not help if your goal is to disable SIP – since the boot to recovery setting is stored in nvram and the ONLY way to get the Mac guest to boot normally again is to remove the. Our screenshots reference VMware Fusion 10.1.3, although the basic process should work on most recent versions of the application. Note that this process is for VMware-based Mac virtual machines with their recovery partition intact.

Instead, there’s an easier way to force a Mac VM to boot in Recovery Mode by simply editing the VM’s configuration file.

It’s possible to use the Command-R key combination when booting a macOS VM in Fusion, but the time window in which Fusion will accept that command is so small that you’ll likely try dozens of times before it works. It’s easy enough to boot an actual Mac into Recovery Mode, but it’s significantly more difficult when using a Mac VM with an application like VMware Fusion. This works fairly well for using the operating system itself as a virtual machine, but pre-boot options like Recovery Mode are a bit trickier to deal with in terms of VMs. For the past several years, Apple has allowed certain versions of macOS to be virtualized on Mac hardware.

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