Mac OSX 10.7 on ESXi and ‘root device uuid is xxx.xxx’ error

I moved my (fully working) OSX 10.7.4 installation from my old ESXi 5 white-box (with an Intel i5 720) to a new one (with an Intel i7 3770). And guess what: OSX didn’t boot.

Just some lines and this last output:

Root device UUID is xxxx.xxx.xx.xxxx

Crap. Google just came back with two (2 !) search results, neither of them giving me a solution. But wait, I’ve found it anyway:

– edit the VM settings with the VM powered off
– click on the Options tab
– click on the CPUID Mask menu item
– click Advanced
– scroll to the bottom of the window on the Virtual Machine Default tab
– under “Level 1” set “eax” to 0000:0000:0000:0001:0000:0110:1010:0101.

After clicking OK and OK, boot up the VM and voilà, your OSX installation is running again!

Yahoo!

3 thoughts on “Mac OSX 10.7 on ESXi and ‘root device uuid is xxx.xxx’ error

  1. Thank you very much, that was of great help!

    My VmWare image work fine on my laptop with Intel Core i5 processor, but does not boot up when migrated to another machine with Intel Core i7 processor. Booting up hangs at “root device UUID is” error and vmware reports “The CPU has been disabled by the operation system.”

    I am using VmWare Workstation and there is no options to mask the CPU ID. Using information from http://communities.vmware.com/message/2062368 I am able to mask the CPU ID manually by edit the VMX file and add the following line:

    cpuid.1.eax = “0000:0000:0000:0001:0000:0110:1010:0101”

    where 1 is the “level 1” that you are referring to, and eax refers to the eax register.

    I would be glad to know where you derive the binary value from to make it work! Many thanks again 🙂

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