Hi there! I've seen other threads on Catalina and VMware Fusion, but they all seem to be about running Fusion under a Catalina host. I'm trying to get Catalina installed as a guest under a Mojave host. The problem is (as others have indicated), it gets stuck at the Apple logo. If I start it with Cmd-V for verbose mode, I see a kernel panic:
Unable to find driver for this platform: \"ACPI\".\n"@/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-6110.0.0.121.5/iokit/kernel/IOPlatformExpert.cpp:1994
My first instinct is that it's because my primary workstation is a ... let's just say it's custom-built about 2 years ago so I could run lots of VMs on heavier hardware than Apple had available at the time. However, seeing as others are having this problem (and presuming at least some of them are running on "standard" hardware) I don't believe this is that.
For context, I initially tried upgrading a duplicated Mojave guest machine (used for a clean testing environment) with Catalina beta 1. Most recently, I tried this approach with a freshly-duplicated Mojave guest with Catalina beta 2, then just a new VM using the Catalina beta 2 installer directly (which, surprisingly, didn't earn me a warning from VMware about an unsupported version). All resulted in the same kernel panic at startup.
I'd appreciate any insights. I hope the title of this thread is clear enough that it redirects others who've made the same mistake I have in following the wrong threads (those about Fusion on a Catalina host).
I hope also that the moderators will be willing to overlook my allusions to "non-standard hardware", given the unique challenges of developing for Apple's ever-changing platforms while being forced to support and test under outdated OS versions with pro hardware that hadn't been upgraded in far too many years. 😍
I think you'll find this thread helpful: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/611961?start=15&tstart=0