Our screenshots reference VMware Fusion 10.1.3, although the basic process should work on most recent versions of the application. Note that this process is for VMware-based Mac virtual machines with their recovery partition intact. Instead, there’s an easier way to force a Mac VM to boot in Recovery Mode by simply editing the VM’s configuration file. It’s possible to use the Command-R key combination when booting a macOS VM in Fusion, but the time window in which Fusion will accept that command is so small that you’ll likely try dozens of times before it works. It’s easy enough to boot an actual Mac into Recovery Mode, but it’s significantly more difficult when using a Mac VM with an application like VMware Fusion. This works fairly well for using the operating system itself as a virtual machine, but pre-boot options like Recovery Mode are a bit trickier to deal with in terms of VMs. For the past several years, Apple has allowed certain versions of macOS to be virtualized on Mac hardware.

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