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windows-10virtualboxmacos-catalinauefi

Stuck on EFI shell while trying to run macOS Catalina 10.15 on virtualbox

I have been trying to install macOS Catalina on virtual box foloowing this tutorial:

https://techsprobe.com/install-macos-catalina-virtualbox-windows/

When getting to the step of having to actually install catalina the virtual machine boots into an EFI shell

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The same person who wrote the tutorial wrote a supposed fix:

https://techsprobe.com/how-to-fix-efi-internal-shell-on-macos-catalina-on-virtualbox/

The fix adds an ISO file which contains parts of an apple file system which is loaded via a startup.nsh file which you create in the shell.

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The fix itself however does not work either. Now I have no idea about how EFI shells work or how "fs#" relates to loading files from the apfs ISO. Here is the startup.nsh file as well as the error associated with trying to run it:

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Now like I said I dont have much of an idea of how EFI works or whats going on here in general, so feel free to educate me.

Solution

  • I was able to fix the UEFI problems as follows (credit to techrechard website):

    At UEFI prompt: Type exit You’ll be brought into an EFI text-mode GUI. Select Boot Maintenance Manager and click. Select Boot From File and click You should see two entries in a list (they are cryptic looking PCI bus paths).

    The first PCI path in the list is probably the boot partition that doesn’t contain bootable firmware. The second PCI path is probably to the recovery partition, the one you need to boot from. If the 2nd partition isn’t the recovery partition, look under the paths in the list to see if one of them is it. If the recovery partition isn’t present and valid, these instructions won’t work.

    Click the 2nd entry, you should see (and then click):

    macOS Install Data

    Then click:

    Locked Files

    Then (if present), click

    Boot Files

    And finally click:

    boot.efi

    Installation will continue, or you will boot into the OS or get the Recovery Utilities menu (where macOS can be reinstalled from or Disk Utilities run). The ambiguity of that last statement is I did that awhile before writing this comment and I don’t recall what I booted into first, only that it worked and was not hard to figure out what to do at that point. If you have a recovery partition, to boot directly into the Recovery Mode turn on the Mac and immediately press and hold (⌘)-R