VMWare doesn't boot Windows 10 Installer

Question

When I try to install Windows 10 on a VM, this appears:

Network boot from Intel E1000
Copyright (C) 2003-2014 VMware, Inc.
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation

CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 0C 29 EC 19 17  GUID: 564D036B-A131-62B4-9CG4-4BAAEEEC1917
PXE-E53: No boot filename received

PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM.
Operating System not found

or

Network boot from Intel E1000... (etc.)

Looks like PXE...

I recreated the VM, and it gave me an EFI boot message.

Attempting to start up from:
-> EFI VMWare Hard Drive
-> EFI Network Boot...
->...

Solution 1

I had the same issue. My solution was to recreate the VM, select Advanced when installing, and choose BIOS instead of UEFI.

If you don't want to have to recreate your VM, just click on it in the sidebar, press 'Edit virtual machine settings', go to the tab 'Options', click 'Advanced' at the bottom, and change the 'Firmware type' to BIOS.

Solution 2

Browse to the folder containing your VM and open the .vmx file in Notepad or the editor of your choice. Then, scroll to the bottom and add this line to the config file.

firmware = "bios"

Works like magic!

Solution 3

I had the same issue today and my fix was going to the VM configuration and under OS, changing Windows 7 to Windows 7 x64.

Then it booted into Windows 7 Installer ISO in UEFI mode (with secure boot unticked).

Comments

[ganesh]

Images are not reable for everyone. Please consider adding the actual text for those of us with screenreaders etc. It also makes it much easier to search for. As to the second error 'an EFI boot message' is rather vague. Please edit the post and add the actual error. And mention if you are doing an EFI boot on a GPT formatted vistual disk or any other boot.

[not my real name]

Thanks for adding an image, Alfabravo I don't have enough rep to do it :)

[rajeev]

Have you correctly configured the CD Drive in your VM? e.g. it should be either the physical drive if you are inserting a physical DVD disk or location of the DVD image .iso for example.

[not my real name]

It's the ISO, positive.

[ganesh]

In the boot text I do nto even see it attempting to access an iso or a physical DVD player. It there more text above it where it tries to do so? If not, go to the VMs firmware (aka the fake BIOS) and make sure that it does see its harddrive, that a CD is visible and that network boot is not set as the first option).

[sam1370]

@Hennes I added a transcript

[not my real name]

The 6000 means 6 seconds? (I'm a programmer, I'm used to these things)

[FoxDeploy]

Yes, it's an amount of time in milliseconds.

[not my real name]

This shows i67.tinypic.com/4kdgx.png

[FoxDeploy]

Hit ESC to choose the boot device and then pick the Windows 10 install .wim file you mounted.

[not my real name]

I chose dvd drive and nothing happened but it saying "Operating System not found" xD why

[not my real name]

I didn't mount a wim file I just am installing windows! Not restoring a backup

[rajeev]

Have you checked just in case if the ISO file is indeed bootable or not? What was the source of the ISO file? Does the ISO file open with 7z app or any other ISO file processing app like Power ISO?

[ganesh]

IIRC win7 UEFI is x64 only, so setting it to ancient 32 bit mode would indeed cause problems.

[Nick M]

For VM Fusion 15 I had to un-check "easy install" and this worked.

[PeterCo]

@Sam1370 There is no possibility to change this setting AFTER the creation of a VM?

[sam1370]

@PeterCo Honestly I don't know, you could try. I am literally a complete beginner to VMWare and I found this question in search of help. A few minutes later I found the answer and decided to post it.

[sam1370]

@PeterCo Coming back to this question, there is a way; see my updated answer.

[acheron55]

This was the only way I could have "Workstation 16 Player" work, since it doesn't seem to have the advanced UI option