Booting from Cd after Mac OSX guest install

[pcollinsca47]

How do I boot a virtual machine from the virtual CD?

I have successfully installed and run a Snow Leopard guest on a Snow Leopard host on a Mac Mini Server.

Now I would like to boot that virtual machine from a CD Image of Clonezilla.

Holding the "c" key during power up, which works on actual hardware doesn't
force the virtual machine to use the virtual CD for booting. Virtualbox indicates that
the keyboard is captured during power up.


Thanks
-pc

[baf]

Only way I have found so far: Move the harddisk to a sata controller then it won't boot.

[nike]

Yes, that's known limitation - VBox EFI isn't exactly Mac one - and magical keys like C or 6 4 combo doesn't work here.
It's possible to implement that (feel free to provide patch), but it's not currently our high priority - so please use some workaround,
for example device shuffling suggested by baf.
Or press ESC during early boot and use EFI boot loader (Boot Manager menu item). But you have to be fast here.

[jpsandiego]

Ancient thread, but very helpful - and since it came up pretty high in the search results on google, figure others would benefit from this update:

I'm running a OS X guest inside of OS X and had been trying to get the "alt/option" key to respond how it would on a regular Mac in order to get into the boot options in the VM. Thanks for mentioning to use the escape key - I hadn't realize it would be that easy! (I needed to boot a GPARTED live CD to fix a problem with the partition table - this error from DiskUtility- "MediaKit reports partition (map) too small.")

I found that while in the VM, I could issue a shutdown/reboot and just started pressing ESC over and over again. Eventually I get to the EFI boot screen without much fuss. From there I was able to boot the LiveCD image I needed. Fantastic!

Thank you