Launching Boot camp Windows (on PVMe) Stuck at "Preparing to configure your virtual machine"

[TimH20]

I have both a boot camp windows installed on a PVMe drive. The Windows instance itself boots fine when I boot directly using the boot loader, but when I try to boot inside of Mac OS Catalina, it never succeeds to boot the first time.

After some digging, I found it was restarting over and over with the same log messages (attached). Most interesting ones, I believe, are here:

10-19 21:21:21.647 F /USB:1368:768d/ [UHC2:203a:fffb:03.81i] ep create:  dscr 07:05, attr 03, mps 0008, interval 0A; streams_count 0
10-19 21:21:21.671 F /monitor/ [AHCI] Enable Command Queue Acceleration
10-19 21:21:21.671 F /monitor/ [SATA0] controller reset
10-19 21:21:21.671 F /monitor/ Enable AHCI mode
10-19 21:21:21.678 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Valid primary and !Valid backup partition table
10-19 21:21:21.678 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Restore backup partition table by the primary will NOT be made
10-19 21:21:21.695 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Valid primary and !Valid backup partition table
10-19 21:21:21.695 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Restore backup partition table by the primary will NOT be made
10-19 21:21:21.717 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Valid primary and !Valid backup partition table
10-19 21:21:21.717 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Restore backup partition table by the primary will NOT be made
10-19 21:21:21.734 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Valid primary and !Valid backup partition table
10-19 21:21:21.734 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Restore backup partition table by the primary will NOT be made
10-19 21:21:21.744 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Valid primary and !Valid backup partition table
10-19 21:21:21.744 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Restore backup partition table by the primary will NOT be made
10-19 21:21:21.755 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Valid primary and !Valid backup partition table
10-19 21:21:21.755 F /monitor/ OTG print:  Restore backup partition table by the primary will NOT be made
10-19 21:21:21.757 F /monitor/ OTG print: PlatformBdsBootFail: Not Found
10-19 21:21:21.766 F /USB:1368:768d/ [UHC] DMA Stopped
10-19 21:21:21.778 F /monitor/ OTG print: UEFI: Do legacy boot. PCI: 00|1F|07 type:2 drive:0x00
10-19 21:21:21.778 F /monitor/ EHC controller reset
10-19 21:21:21.779 F /monitor/ Keyboard Controller: system reset
10-19 21:21:21.779 F /monitor/ Send system reset (VCPU0)

This repeats over and over. After hours, no progress is made and Parallels continues to retry in this infinite failing boot loop.

Other VMs (Debian LINUX) work just fine with full graphics acceleration. It is just the windows bootcamp VM that fails like this.

 

[TimH20]

Windows boots just fine if I boot it with a virtual hard disk. It's just the bootcamp configuration that fails. Maybe a boot flag is needed?

 

[TimH20]

Well, I figured this one out myself. Looks like Windows installed with an GPT+MSR partition rather than standard GUID layout (Recovery + EFI + NTFS partition with actual windows 10 install).

Now that my boot camp partition layout looks like this, Parallels Desktop launches it just fine!

Windows is kind of tricky to force to make it install in a GUID layout when not using the Boot Camp installer.

 

[AndersL4]

Thanks so much for the hint! I was pulling my hair out trying to solve the same issue. Quite a bother to get Windows to install with manual partition layout (had to physically remove all other drives but the target nvme stick, otherwise it kept saying it couldn't create or locate a partition), but once I did it worked without a hiccup.

 

[TimH20]

Glad that helped, Anders! Yeah, getting windows to use a GUID layout required me to remove all other drives, also. Kind of a pain.