I installed a macOS virtual machine on VMware Fusion. As you may know, the installation time is super long. It took me about 1 hour to complete the installation. To save recovery time in case my computer OS needs to be re-installed. I exported the virtual machine to an OVA file to another partition.
However, the virtual machine failed to boot up when I imported the OVA file as a new virtual machine. I got the following error message:
Mac OS X… No Media
And the virtual machine entered the Boot Manager screen after few minutes. Mac OS X was in the boot list. However, it wouldn’t allow me to boot even I chosen it manually.
I tried to reset NVRAM for the virtual machine. It’s no luck. BTW, Apple has an official article talks about how to reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac. I’m not sure is it suitable for macOS virtual machines. I just simply delete the *.nvram file in the virtual machine’s package.
I also tried to reset BIOS and EFI booting order…etc. No one works.
Finally, I created a new empty virtual machine with macOS 11.0 as the operating system. And compared the configuration file between the empty and imported virtual machines. And I noticed that the guestos parameter was different:
My imported virtual machine is guestos = "other".
The empty virtual machine is guestOS = "darwin20-64".
The fix is just simply to change the guest OS from other to darwin20-64.
I’m not sure why the parameter was changed after exporting and importing. It may be a VMware Fusion bug.
VMware Fusion is quite different from VMware Workstation. To open the VMX file for a virtual machine. You need to right-click the virtual machine in the virtual machine library and hold the Option (Alt) key, then select Open Config File in Editor.