In this article, I’ll show you how to Fix EFI Internal Shell on macOS Catalina on VirtualBox. macOS Catalina is by far the most solid operating system for Mac users. It was released on October 7, 2019, and since then it has been in hands of thousands and even millions of people which include macOS installed on Windows. As the users and lovers of this macOS are increasing the questions and problems are also increasing.
Users like to explore and see features of the new macOS specifically on Windows. That’s easy to do with us. I’ve made a complete step by step tutorial on install macOS Catalina on VirtualBox and also install macOS on VMware. But similar to macOS Catalina stuck at Apple logo when installing on VMware, in VirtualBox, users encounter UEFI or EFI Internal Shell on macOS Catalina or in some cases it also appears as VirtualBox FS1 problem. Since installing macOS Catalina is new for most Windows users and that’s what not everyone knows about so here’s how to fix that.
If you are also one of the users who don’t know how to solve this problem, you are in the right place. In today’s article, we’re going to learn what s UEFI, what is Virtualbox and how to Fix UEFI Internal Shell on macOS Catalina on VirtualBox.
- How to Fix macOS Catalina Stuck on Apple Logo When Installing on VMware
- Fix Mouse & Keyboard Stuck on macOS Catalina on VirtualBox
Table of Contents
What is UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface?)
To better understand UEFI you need to know what is BIOS because UEFI has replaced BIOS. BIOS is the basic input-output system. It allows level software to reside in a chip on the computer motherboard. BIOS is what loads up when the computer starts for waking up your computer’s hardware components to ensure correctly during boot time.
It runs the bootloader to start up your operating system. BIOS goes through the post (power-on self-test.) This happens before noting into the operating system to ensure hardware configurations are valid and working correctly. BIOS has not advanced with the latest PC technology in the market because it has several limitations as it can only boot from hard drives of 2.1TB or even less and many other quantitative that leads UEFI to take place of BIOS.
UEFI still provides a way to boot into BIOS. Its firmware can boot from hard drives of 2.2TB (terabytes) even larger and due to using GPT partition instead of the MBR. UEFI supports secure boot which actually checks for the malware during the boot process and it supports networking features within the firewire.
What is Virtualbox
Virtualbox is a free open source project and it essentially emulates running a full physical computer so that you can run another operating system on a server. Virtualization is the process and Virtualbox is the application for making it. Such as we have a computer within the software that is the inside of it and no one can see that but the hardware of a computer is visible. In the same case with virtualization and Virtualbox. Virtualbox is visible but virtualization is the process and the inside part.
Fix UEFI or EFI Internal Shell on macOS Catalina on VirtualBox
When you encounter EFI internal shell you may see an error or a notice. Don’t panic because nothing is wrong with your operating system and there’s no huge case. This error can come due to many reasons. One of the primary reason is, at the first steps when you create your virtual machine, you have to apply the code to VirtualBox on Command Prompt, you had to close your machine clearly and then apply the code to your virtual machine. When you’ve forget that, the error may be likely due to that.
If you are stuck at this EFI shell you need to create a new virtual machine. If you are a beginner, check this link down below to create a new virtual machine. There, we have provided the easiest way by following a few simple steps to create a virtual machine.
The second most common reason users encounter this problem is because of Apple File System (APFS). APFS is Apple’s new file system for Apple products such as MacOS, ipadOSs, watchOS, TVOS, and other Apple products. APFS doesn’t work perfectly with a VirtualBox specifically with macOS Catalina. This may encounter this and may also appear some other problems too. If you have tried to install or update macOS with APFS on VirtualBox, you will be probably stuck in the shell. When you face such problems you need to download a boot the ISO from the APFS boot image and load a driver from that. After downloading you can boot to your macOS.
For solving this problem turn off your machine first. From the top click on the Close icon and click Power off the machine.
Close VirtualBox Before Applying
Go to the Settings of the machine. There, you need to add the APFS EFI Boot Image on the machine.
Settings
After you are into machine settings, press “Storage”, select the CD/ISO file and click on the CD icon at the top right of the settings and click choose “Virtual Optical Disk File”.
Settings
Go over to your files and select the APFS EFI Boot Image file, click “open” and a new page will open and click OK in the machine setting.
Select APFS EFI Boot Image
edit startup.nsh
Startup.nsh
Type these commands there and when you are done press Ctrl-Q and then press.
echo -off load fs1:\EFI\drivers\apfs.efi load fs1:\EFI\drivers\AppleUiSupport.efi load fs1:\EFI\drivers\ApfsDriverLoader.efi map -r fs2: cd System\Library\CoreServices\ boot.efi
Commands
On this page just type exit and click enter.
Exit
Just hit Enter for moving forward.
Continue
After you continue, you just need to wait for a while and then you’ll be welcomed with a screen asking you about your location. After you select your country you will be asked some more details of you, which you can do easily. Set up however you want and click Continue.
Welcome
Fix EFI Internal Shell on macOS Catalina on VirtualBox [Next Method]
These steps were used by one of the users who had the same problem as yours and fixed it through the following steps. You can try troubleshooting with these steps. Just follow these steps.
Parsa Mousavi
That doesn’t work for me.I’m stuck in the “boot.efi” phase.The CPU usage suddenly goes up to 13% and nothing happens even after 3 or 4 minutes.I use VBox 6.1 on Ubuntu 18.04.I can load all the aforementioned EFI modules but unable to boot.I had installed MacOS Catalina some time ago and I moved the .vmdk file into a different linux installation(now) and I cannot boot it even though I’ve configured the VM via “vboxmanage” properly.Any idea?Thanks in advance.
Arnold Schwarzie
Hi Ibrahim, thanks a lot for your useful guides ! It helped me to successfully install Big Sur on VirtualBox. I’ve now applied twice updates that macOS would apply but after this second update (one month ago), the VM wn’t start anymore and gets stuck at the UEFI Shell displaying the FS Map table.
I’ve tried to apply your fix for Catalina but the trouble is I can not even boot on any virtual CD (even not your APFS EFI iso) and whatever settings I try to adapt in the UEFI/BIOS, the following Reset always ends with the UEFI shell. Could you help me out here please ?
Arnold Schwarzie
UPDAT on my previous comment: I’ve tried to find out from the script of your post what I could try next and here is what I’ve found:
1) in any case the ‘dit’ command is not recognized (and not displayed in the list of commands when entering ‘help’ either)
2) I tried to manually execute the commands from the script and could load the 3 EFI drivers but from FS0 no FS1 (I assume that’s where your APFS iso got mapped?)
3) the I tried to manually go to the Sytem\… folder which couldn’t be found but on FS5: (!) which also had the full path ‘\System\Library\CoreServices\’ but unfortunately there was no ‘boot.efi’ file there so I got a ‘not a recognized command’ error message.
What do I do from here ? ^_^
Arnold Schwarzie
UPDATE 2 on my previous comment : I’ve seen the additional workaround and after checking further the other file systems I *did* find FS3 which had only a single folder named ‘D3EE2639-C393-3B56-AE68-CEE5BE8FA48C’ but unfortunately it didn’t contain any ‘System’ folder, but 72 other files and among others 17 files starting with ‘boot.efi.xxxxxx.im4m’
Needless to say, I’m speechless about what to do now ! Heeeelp ! ^_^
Thanks again for your precious time Ibrahim
Arnold Schwarzie
UPDATE3: while fizzling around and trying to understand what I was doing, I did some research on internet, I now understand that the screen where I land is the UEFI shell, which diplays the output of the ‘map’ command with the mounted file systems (FS0 … FSx). You have to type the file system identifier e.g. ‘FS0’ before you can explore it with the linux ‘ls’ command. I could so find that I had a *second* mounted file system with the ‘D3EE2639-…FA48C’ folder, and where I could find the ‘System\Library\CoreServices’ folder where a file named ‘boot.efi’ was residing among many other files. Typing ‘boot.efi’ and hitting Enter finally *did* start MacOS’ Big Sur GUI until the login screen. Unfortunately, once logged in the OS crashes while loading Finder, i.e. the OS is completely unusable as such.
As displayed in UPDATE2, I did type all these commands manually, and apparently the system doesn’t find the necessary ‘startup.nsh’ script file to do all this automatically — and I couldn’t find this file either on the various file systems and folders I’ve looked into.
Some forums (namely VirtualBox) seem to suggest that the problem is with an incompatibility with VBox’s Guest Addons. I’m not sure how this explains the mess in the (duplicated) file systems and why ‘startup.nsh’ would be gone. I also wonder if this isn’t a consequence of Big Sur still BETA.
My current opinion right now is that the better thing could be to go through the whole full reinstallation from scratch… and this time take snapshots before allowing MacOS to update itself.
jon
I had the same issue and the following solved the problem for me with the mojava image. I could load the boot.efi from the macos install folder on one of the drives listed, several sub folders down
https://superuser.com/questions/1235970/stuck-on-uefi-interactive-shell-with-mac-os-x-high-sierra-vm