A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my mid-2011 iMac to Yosemite and until yesterday all was going well. Yesterday I had the need to run Windows and so fired up VMWare Fusion. I’d already upgraded to Fusion 7 as version 6 has Yosemite compatibility issues.
This is what happened when I ran a virtual machine, running Windows 7 and Office 2013:
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Windows took over 10 minutes to boot up (normally takes about 2 minutes using this particular VM). In fact unless I constantly wiggled my mouse, the bootup process came to a grinding halt.
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Once successfully booted, apps such as Word and Excel took about 2 minutes to load (about twice as long as normal)
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On shutting down Windows, a number of Windows Updates were applied which took over 8 hours!
I restarted the Mac using a bootable Mavericks backup that I created just before installing Yosemite and successfully ran the Windows virtual machine.
So off to the VMWare forum I went in search of a solution and this is what I found:
"You’ve bumped into an Apple bug, affecting all hypervisor programs (a program that runs a virtual machine i.e. VMWare Fusion and Parallels) running on Yosemite on mid-2011 iMacs. Apple is aware of the issue."
The fix is to use this Terminal command: sudo nvram boot-args=debug=0x10
- Using Spotlight or your usual Launcher such as Alfred or LaunchBar, run the Terminal
- At the Terminal prompt, type the above command (or copy and paste it from above) and press Enter
- Enter your Mac account password and press Enter
- You should be left at the Terminal prompt
- To check it has worked type the following at the Terminal prompt: sudo nvram boot-args
- The Terminal should return: boot-args debug=0x10
- Close the Terminal window
- Restart the Mac
Thank you! This worked very well with Ubuntu and Windows 7 machines.
I have a Macbook Pro mid-2009 running VMware Fusion 6.06. It’s running 6.06 because the older versions were very slow and also I’m afraid to upgrade to Fusion 7 as my money for 6 didn’t do anything. I’m only running Windows 7 to run Quicken. The whirly bird is my enemy and the machine runs really hot. I’ve been suffering for years.
Will your 2011 fix work for me? Will I screw up my machine if I try it? I also have lots of recurring problems with VMware Fusion 6.06 where the VM instance suddenly cannot find it’s “peer process”.
Hi Mark. If you checkout the link to VMWare’s forum in my blog post (https://communities.vmware.com/message/2442606#2442606) it appears some people have had success with older MacBooks and iMacs. I will caveat my comment by saying that I have not tried it with anything other than my 2011 iMac.
will this work for a mid-2009 Macbook?