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[Documentation] VMware needs to be configured to use EFI

Open codethief opened this issue 8 months ago • 0 comments

This cost me 2 hours to debug, so maybe the following will help others save some time: In VMware I created a new VM from scratch and added the .vmdk file generated by nixos-generators as SCSI hard drive. Then during boot-up I received the following error:

PXE-E53: No boot filename received
PXE-M0f: Exiting Intel PXE ROM.
Operating system not found.

It seemed VMware was trying to boot from the network even though the hard drive came first in the boot order.

The solution was to "Edit virtual machine settings" -> Tab: Options -> Advanced -> Firmware type and there choose UEFI instead of BIOS, since this is what vmware-image.nix uses, too. (I hadn't set anything related to EFI/BIOS in my Nix config.)

Maybe this piece of information could be added to the table of output formats in the README?

codethief avatar Apr 05 '25 13:04 codethief