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I am running VirtualBox 6.0.10 on an iMac (Mojave) and I prepared a macOS High Sierra VM from the ground up with VirtualBox. The VM runs fine, but I am not able to update the guest OS from 10.13.4 to 10.13.6.

The reason for that, as far as I understood, is that the macOS update is installed onto the recovery partition of the VM hard drive and the VM should boot from this partition to finish the update. Unfortunately, the UEFI boot settings of VirtualBox seem to overrun the macOS settings and the system always boots the regular macOS partition. So each time I start the update from macOS, the reboot gives me an unaltered system.

While preparing the High Sierra VM, I had a hard time getting out of the UEFI shell and selecting the correct boot.efi in order to boot the system (for instructions, look here).

But now I want to get into the UEFI shell, then to the boot options. I found hints to press F12 or fn-F12 "during boot" for getting into the shell, but I tried it several times to no avail. Also hitting "AnyKey" during boot, as suggested elsewhere (very funny), did not help.

At what time during boot exactly should I press what key?

Are there other options to accomplish that?

Dirk
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2 Answers2

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The only way to get in the boot menu if you are on an EFI system is F2 on virtualbox. Best way to enter it is to start the machine, wait that the requesters go away

Zibri
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Regarding which key: The space bar served me well as "AnyKey".

Regarding what time: I clicked the green arrow in the VirtualBox Manager to start my VM and immediately started hitting the space bar. This got me into the EFI menu on the first try.

Thanks to VirtualBox forum for help.

Dirk
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