How do I disable VMWare Fusion at startup?

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Level 1

35 points

How do I disable VMWare Fusion at startup?

I'm having kernel panics and can't get past the grey apple/progress gear screen. I've gone through all the usual kernel panic trouble shooting procedures so please don't direct me to those knowledge base pages.

The problem set in while my son was running a 3D Windows game in Fusion. Definitely overtaxing the system.

So I finally got the computer to start in verbose mode which is quite interesting and what I find is lots and lots of vmware stuff right up at the top of the startup process. The whole startup grinds to a halt in the middle of vmware which would indicate that something related to fusion is causing difficulties.

So is there any way for me to start up without VMware doing it's thing?

intel imac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Aug 17, 2010 8:13 AM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Aug 17, 2010 9:50 AM in response to hart40

SAFE BOOT

Disable login and startup items
Remove the startup item

Boot from another hard drive first though and REPAIR your system, and you are going to want to troubleshoot and repair Windows as well.

The gear is because the system directory needs repairing, from another hard drive, your DVD of OS X, and would be nice to have Disk Warrior.

I'd direct you to Fusion Community for one thing.

Boot and clone your hard drive so you have a bootable copy if you have not already. You can use Disk Utility Restore to make an image on another hdd.

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Answer 2

hart40 Author

Level 1

35 points

Aug 18, 2010 11:57 AM in response to hart40

Unfortunately, safe boot is not working. Just won't happen.

I was able to repair with disk utilities using firewire target disk mode and still can't start up.

While in target disk mode I also just as a test moved all Fusion related items to a folder. Then starting in verbose mode all VMware stuff was gone but the process still ground to a halt just at a different point.

The hitch here is that I don't have my install disks with me.

I'm going to cruise over to the Fusion forums but they're pretty dead. A good proportion of threads go with no replies.

Thanks.

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Answer 3

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Aug 18, 2010 12:13 PM in response to hart40

Buy Disk Warrior (check "Hard drives" on Macintouch); a copy of SuperDuper if you haven't; a couple of external backup drives (you can even put VMs that aren't also sharing a Boot Camp partition over on FW (just not USB pls!).

And always have

bootable backup of OS X
emergency boot partition for OS X as well (used only for maintenance repairs)

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