J.D. Hodges

The VMWare PXE network boot screen can be rather annoying:

How often do I actually boot from the network? Virtually never… so let us disable even checking for network boot on this VM!

Here are the steps for disabling network boot on a Windows 7 VM host (or Windows 8 host) and a Windows 7 guest OS:

#0 Power off your virtual machine

#1 Use notepad (or your favorite text editor) to edit your virtual machine’s .vmx file

For example, my VMX file for this particular VM was located here:

C:\Users\JD\Documents\Virtual Machines\01 Small Template, Windows 7 x64\01 Small Template, Windows 7 x64.vmx

#2 Find the network adapter section of the .vmx text file and add the following:

ethernet0.opromsize = "0"

(or adjust as approriate for your particular ethernetX adapter)

The applicable line that you need to add is highlighted

That is it, easy as pie! 🙂

Voila, no more trying to boot to the network! Not it is time to install an OS 😉

Thanks for visiting and I hope this helps if you find yourself in a similar situation… 🙂

More info:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014906