My Win10 guest boots perfectly without EFI, but when I enable EFI in VM Settings, the guest gets stuck in the boot up sequence. In the second screen I show below, anything I do eventually takes me back to the first screen.
Is anyone able to get Win10 to boot on macOS Catalina with EFI enabled?
TIA,
Mark
Windows 10 won't boot with EFI enabled
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- Posts: 31
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Windows 10 won't boot with EFI enabled
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- First screen I see when trying to boot
- Screen Shot 2021-10-16 at 22.08.21.png (101.37 KiB) Viewed 5149 times
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- Second screen I see, if I try to <exit> the first screen
- Screen Shot 2021-10-16 at 22.08.44.png (64.78 KiB) Viewed 5149 times
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Re: Windows 10 won't boot with EFI enabled
I don't use UEFI mode for my vms, but from my experience with physical PCs you can't just switch modes and expect it to boot. Machines using legacy boot use the old MBR format for their discs but UEFI requires GPT. I suspect you would need to convert your existing virtual hard drive, or at least the partition which has the Windows boot loader on it, to GPT.
Bill
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Re: Windows 10 won't boot with EFI enabled
What Bill said. If you want to enable EFI you need to do it before you install Win10. In fact just about everything on the motherboard should be decided before you install an OS.
There may be a way to migrate the Windows image using Macrium, see here: https://kb.macrium.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50151.aspx. You'd have to revert the VM settings to make a bootable VM, boot it and make a Macrium backup, then modify the VM settings and try the Macrium restore.
Of course a VM backup would be a good idea before trying this.
There may be a way to migrate the Windows image using Macrium, see here: https://kb.macrium.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50151.aspx. You'd have to revert the VM settings to make a bootable VM, boot it and make a Macrium backup, then modify the VM settings and try the Macrium restore.
Of course a VM backup would be a good idea before trying this.
Re: Windows 10 won't boot with EFI enabled
You can use the mbr2gpt tool which is included in Windows 10 - I've used it a couple of times
whilst testing UEFI. It works fine. See description here
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... mbr-to-gpt
It's not really designed to be used on a running system so just boot your VM with a Windows 10 ISO.
Instead of following the install route, take the repair option and then go into the command prompt and
use mbr2gpr from there. Once the system disk is converted, select UEFI in the VM definition and it
should start correctly.
whilst testing UEFI. It works fine. See description here
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... mbr-to-gpt
It's not really designed to be used on a running system so just boot your VM with a Windows 10 ISO.
Instead of following the install route, take the repair option and then go into the command prompt and
use mbr2gpr from there. Once the system disk is converted, select UEFI in the VM definition and it
should start correctly.