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myspaghetti / macos-virtualbox

Push-button installer of macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra guests in Virtualbox on x86 CPUs for Windows, Linux, and macOS
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Monterey install to VirtualBox leaves Recovery Partition unbootable #621

Closed CalculonPrime closed 1 year ago

CalculonPrime commented 1 year ago

Creating this issue because this project seems to be the best source of information for Monterey + VirtualBox on the web, so hopefully someone knowledgeable will drop in once search engines start returning the hit. I'm somewhat confused about whether this is kosher with the project owner, as one earlier issue about the boot loop was closed "because the script doesn't support Monterey or Big sur," but a similar issue was allowed to remain open and gathered lots of useful posts that solved the issue for most involved.

Here, specifically, the issue is that after installing Monterey to VB, you can't boot into the Recovery Partition using "boot from file" in the VirtualBox BIOS, because boot.efi is missing. Instead there is either nothing shown, or a bunch of similar files that don't work (_boot.efi, etc.). VMware has a similar bug logged against it, so what I assume happened is that starting in Big Sur, Apple made some formatting change to the Recovery partition, and VMware and VirtualBox were caught with their pants down.

You can see my original comment about this in the bootloop thread here.

BTW, there are lots of suggestions on how to "work around" this by simply creating another Monetery installation, perhaps on an external USB, to work as a Recovery partition. I don't want that. i want the stock, included Recovery partition to work.

myspaghetti commented 1 year ago

I'm fine with this, but keep in mind that this is not a troubleshooting forum and after a week or two I'll close the issue whether or not it's resolved.

CalculonPrime commented 1 year ago

OK, I'm curious. What allowed this issue to remain open for 4 months (roughly)?

myspaghetti commented 1 year ago

There's no grand design with my issue tracking, it's all pretty haphazard. I tend to be more liberal with issues with upgrades because incorporating newer versions of macOS into the script is the most popular enhancement request. A solution exists but I'm not motivated to work on it, although it should be straightforward to implement. Meanwhile, issues with upgrading get a bit of a grace period on the issue tracker even though they're not technically issues with the script.