Delay boot time on a VMware virtual machine

Somewhere in a dark corner at VMware HQ somebody had the great idea of setting the BIOS to display for less than two seconds on a virtual machine, which makes it almost impossible to hit the F2 key needed to access the BIOS menu. Fortunately, there is a simple solution.

Solution

Open the virtual machine .vmx configuration file you wish to modify and somewhere in the configuration add the following parameter.

bios.bootDelay = "5000"

Here is an example of how it looks.

bios_boot_delay

What this parameter is extend the BIOS display time for five seconds, which is enough time for you to press the F2 key.

vmware_bios

References

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/106757

Author Information
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2 Comments
  1. Rich says:

    That’s handy. Here’s another one useful when installing new guest OS from an ISO image. Boot directly to the BIOS setup so you can change the boot device order.

    bios.forceSetupOnce = “TRUE”

  2. Marcin says:

    It works. Thanks a lot!

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