Recently, I upgraded VMWare workstation Pro from 17.0 to 17.5 and after that, my macOS Virtual machines stopped working. Every time I start the VMs, it restarts automatically in a loop.
I switched on other Windows-based VMs and they were switching ON just fine. I have fixed the issue by using the below steps:
STEP 1 – Check VMWARE.log file
- VMWARE.log file is stored in the same folder where the other files of Virtual machine are stored. To find the location of Virtual machine, you can right-click on your VM from VM Workstation console and click on Settings.
- Under Hardware tab, click on Hard-disk, and on the right-hand side find Disk file location. This is the location where your VM is stored, Go to that location.
- You will find a file called vmware.log, open the file and check the logs.
You may file below errors in the file:
2023-10-20T16:54:42.194Z In(05) vcpu-5 SMC_Open: Unable to open MacHALDriver: 0x00000002. 2023-10-20T16:54:42.199Z In(05) vcpu-5 Chipset: The guest has requested that the virtual machine be hard reset. 2023-10-20T16:54:42.202Z In(05) vcpu-0 DEVICE: Resetting device 'ALL'. 2023-10-20T16:53:10.574Z In(05) vmx FeatureCompat: No EVC masks.
2023-10-20T16:57:29.038Z In(05) vmx GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox-dnd timed out. 2023-10-20T16:57:37.922Z In(05) vcpu-2 Chipset: The guest has requested that the virtual machine be hard reset. 2023-10-20T16:57:37.988Z In(05) vcpu-0 DEVICE: Resetting device 'ALL'.
STEP 2 – Update Unlocker for VMWARE Workstation
- Download Unlocker from https://github.com/paolo-projects/unlocker/releases.
- Right-click on this file and select Extract All. It will extract all the contents of zip file into a separate folder.
- Make sure All VMs are powered off and VMWare Workstation is also closed.
- Right-click command prompt and click run as administrator.
- Change the folder location to the extracted folder location on command prompt
- Execute
Win-install.cmd
script to fix this issue.
- Launch the macOS VM again, this time it will boot up without any issues.